Achieving Interaction Fluidity in a Wizard-of-Oz Robotic System: A Prototype for Fluid Error-Correction

TL;DR

This paper introduces a VR-based Wizard-of-Oz system for mobile manipulators that enhances interaction fluidity by supporting error correction, interruptibility, and latency optimization, addressing current HRI challenges.

Contribution

It proposes key properties for fluid HRI systems and presents a VR simulation environment that meets these criteria for improved robot interaction.

Findings

The VR environment supports fluid error correction in HRI.

Key properties like interruptibility and latency measurement improve interaction quality.

The system facilitates more natural and efficient human-robot communication.

Abstract

Achieving truly fluid interaction with robots with speech interfaces remains a hard problem, and the experience of current Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) remains laboured and frustrating. Some of the barriers to fluid interaction stem from a lack of a suitable development platform for HRI for improving interaction, even in robotic Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) modes of operation used for data collection and prototyping. Based on previous systems, we propose the properties of interruptibility and correction (IaC), pollability, latency measurement and optimisation and time-accurate reproducibility of actions from logging data as key criteria for a fluid WoZ system to support fluid error correction. We finish by presenting a Virtual Reality (VR) HRI simulation environment for mobile manipulators which meets these criteria.