Exploring Minimal Nonverbal Interruption in Social HRI

摘要

Designing robotic behaviours capable of initiating an interruption will be extremely important as robots increasingly interact with people. In this paper, we evaluate a minimal set of physical and nonverbal cues that can be exhibited by a robot to initiate robot-human interruption: (a) speed of motion, (b) gaze, (c) head movement, d) rotation and (e) proximity to the person. We then present a set of studies. For requirements gathering, we started with observations of interruption between humans, with a human actor attempting to interrupt other humans while being constrained to use only a set of behavioural cues that could be mimicked by a simple nonverbal robot. Next, we programmed a robot to exhibit these social nonverbal cues, and tested their feasibility in two separate pilot user evaluations. Finally, we performed an extensive user study of robotic nonverbal interruption across interruption scenarios. People were able to interpret robot behaviour as interruptions, and we identified the dominant cues people used to relate robotic behaviour to interruption urgency.