Spot Report: An Open-Source and Real-Time Secondary Task for Human-Robot Interaction User Experiments

Abstract

The human-robot interaction (HRI) community is interested in a range of research questions, many of which are investigated through user experiments. Robots that occasionally require human input allow for humans to engage in secondary tasks. However, few secondary tasks transmit data in real-time and are openly available, which hinders interaction with the primary task and limits the ability of the community to build upon others' research. Also, the need for a secondary task relevant to the military was identified by subject matter experts. To address these concerns, this paper presents the spot report task as an open-source secondary task with real-time communication for use in HRI experiments. The spot report task requires counting target objects in static images. This paper includes details of the spot report task and real-time communication with a primary task. We developed the spot report task considering the military domain, but the software architecture is domain-independent. We hope others can leverage the spot report task in their own user experiments. The software files are available at https://github.com/UMich-MAVRIC/SpotReport.