A Wizard of Oz Study of Human Interest Towards Robot Initiated Human-Robot Interaction

Abstract

Service robots have become a widely used tool in human-friendly assistive tasks in many aspects including social environments. Maintaining a sustainable interaction with humans is essential in performing assistive tasks in this regard. Therefore, a robot must be equipped with intelligent cognitive skills in decision making as well as in making friendly relationships with its human user. Human-like capabilities such as initiating a conversation at the right moment without distracting and maintaining an appropriate interaction are important cues in this context. This paper presents a human study conducted by means of a wizard-of-oz (WoZ) experiment to identify the behavioral features in humans that can be utilized by an assistive robot in a domestic environment to assess the situation prior to an interaction. Both verbal and nonverbal responses of participants towards an interaction initiated by a robot were recorded and analyzed to identify human behavioral changes that portray an interest towards interaction. The experiment was conducted in a simulated domestic environment and findings of the experiment are presented and discussed so that these findings could be made use of when designing human-like social robots in future. Furthermore, human behavioral changes observed during the study are analyzed and critical observations are highlighted.