A WOZ Environment for Studying Mutual Adaptive Behaviors in Gesture-based Human-robot Interaction

Contents

Mutual adaptation is considered to be one of the key issues in realizing a human robot interaction (HRI) system. In order to develop a mutually adaptive interactive robot system, the authors adopt a bootstrapping approach comprising three stages: a human-human WOZ (Wizard of OZ) experiment, a human-robot WOZ experiment, and a human-adaptive robot experiment. This paper will focus on the second stage where the authors developed a human-robot WOZ experimental environment and conducted an experiment to evaluate its effectiveness. The primary results suggested the following: the WOZ environment can function well; the operator's view mode can be considered as a relatively intuitive operational mode for a human WOZ operator; and the realtime video image of the robot's movement is necessary for the WOZ operator when he/she operates the robot while simultaneously watching the gestural instructions of the instructor. Some adaptive behaviors are observed as well. In addition, the primary results also suggested that the environment can be easily utilized with minor modifications to build a human-adaptive robot experiment.