How Much Progress Did I Make? An Unexplored Human Feedback Signal for Teaching Robots

TL;DR

This paper investigates the use of a progress signal, representing task completion percentage, as a human teaching cue for robots, validating its effectiveness and consistency across studies without extra effort.

Contribution

It introduces and validates the progress signal as a useful, low-cost human teaching feedback for robot learning, and provides a new dataset of non-expert demonstrations.

Findings

Progress indicates task success and completion degree

Progress is consistent across participants

Providing progress does not increase workload

Abstract

Enhancing the expressiveness of human teaching is vital for both improving robots' learning from humans and the human-teaching-robot experience. In this work, we characterize and test a little-used teaching signal: \textit{progress}, designed to represent the completion percentage of a task. We conducted two online studies with 76 crowd-sourced participants and one public space study with 40 non-expert participants to validate the capability of this progress signal. We find that progress indicates whether the task is successfully performed, reflects the degree of task completion, identifies unproductive but harmless behaviors, and is likely to be more consistent across participants. Furthermore, our results show that giving progress does not require extra workload and time. An additional contribution of our work is a dataset of 40 non-expert demonstrations from the public space study through an ice cream topping-adding task, which we observe to be multi-policy and sub-optimal, with sub-optimality not only from teleoperation errors but also from exploratory actions and attempts. The dataset is available at https://github.com/TeachingwithProgress/Non-Expert\_Demonstrations.