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Human Interaction

Contents

• Human Interaction
  • Human Safety
  • Communication
  • Approaching Humans

Human Safety

As the plan is for DOT to move around a room autonomously, there is concern that DOT could run into people and cause them harm. To combat this we will need to make sure we are using enough sensors and have done extensive testing before putting DOT into an area with unsuspecting humans. If DOT was prone to running into people this would cause people to activly try to avoid DOT, which is not what we want to happen.

Communication

Communication between human and robot is extremely important in creating a positive experience.

A few ideas we have had:

• Creating a GUI, which would display the questions on a touch screen, where the user can then press “Yes” or “No” in answer to the question. This would be the easiest to implement, and will be what we aim to do for the first iteration of DOT

• Expanding on the previous idea would be using text to voice and voice to text. DOT would ask the question using a voice that we deemed appropriate(not scary) and then the human/user interacting with DOT could then answer by simply saying “Yes” or “No”. Using this method would make people more likely to want to interact with DOT. Using this method in conjuntion with the previous method would also open DOT up to be used by a range of different people with different abilities. e.g. hearing impaired can use the touch screen, sight impaired can use voice.

Approaching Humans

DOT is planned to be autonomous, DOT will be approaching humans without outside interference.

The way that DOT approaches a human is very important. We don’t want DOT to rush up on someone and get into their space and start demanding they take a survey, as that could make the human extremely uncomfortable or angry. “An Approach from a robot is not an easy problem since the robot’s approach needs to be acknowledged nonverbally in advance; otherwise, the approached person might not recognize that the robot is approaching him/her or would be surprised by the robot’s impolite interruption.” (Satake et al., 2020)

To avoid an uncomfortable approach we could focus on making DOT passive. Not approaching people but waiting for people to approach first. I believe this would quite succesful most of the time as most people find robots qutie facinating and would want to interact with DOT, especially if they are coming to an I.T. related event.

What about the people who are a little unsure about approaching, or want to interact with DOT and not really sure how they should initiate the interaction.

Perhaps a way to sense the position of a human.

• If they have their back to the robot or side on in deep conversation with someone = not intersted
• Looking directly at robot = interested This would be quite difficult to implement and involve extensive research and hardware to make happen.

The first iteration of DOT could involve the passive approach, where DOT will stay in one area, as people pass by or approach DOT would greet the human and wait for a response, before asking if they would like to participate in a survey. This would be the best option for a room that is quite small or crowded, like the project room.

After that we could work on getting DOT moving around a larger area like the Hub. Figuring out the best option of approaching someone that looks interested, but not invading that persons space.

An extremely good research paper on approaching humans is here