Human to Robot Demonstrations of Routine Home Tasks:Acknowledgment and Response to the Robot’s Feedback

This paper investigates the possible role of the robot’s feedback in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) from the human perspective, and attempts to highlight some important conceptual and practical issues such as the lack of explicitness and consistency on people’s demonstration strategies. More specifically, any changes that can be expected on the part of a human (teacher), in the teaching of a task, when a robot (student) declares that the given demonstration was not understood. The findings from such studies can help in turn, from a system perspective, towards the design of HRI systems that are able to better anticipate and behave according to human expectations. Partly intended as a replication and verification of a previous study, the everyday domestic task of setting a table, both in Japanese and in non-Japanese (or “western”) style, is taught to a humanoid robot by the participants of the currently conducted user study. The participant’s acknowledgment and responses to the robot’s feedback are discussed in regard to demonstration changes and consistency, based on a HRI gesture classification.