The Director Task: a Psychology-Inspired Task to Assess Cognitive and Interactive Robot Architectures

Abstract

Assessing robotic architecture for Human-Robot Interaction can be challenging due to the number of features a robot has to endow to perform an acceptable interaction. While everyday-inspired tasks are interesting as reflecting a realistic use of such robots, they often contain a lot of unknown and uncontrolled conditions and specific robot behavior can be hard to test. In this paper, we propose a new psychology-inspired task, gathering perspective-taking, planning, knowledge representation with theory of mind, manipulation, and communication. Along with a precise description of the task allowing its replication, we present a cognitive robot architecture able to perform it in its nominal cases. We finally suggest some challenges and evaluations for the Human-Robot Interaction research community, all derived from this easy-to-replicate task.