Multimodal communication for guiding a person following robot

Robots designed to support people in different tasks at home and in public areas need to be able to recognize user intentions and operate accordingly. To date, research has focused on developing the technological capabilities of the robot and the mechanism of recognition. Little is known about navigational commands that could be intuitively communicated by people in order to control a robot's movement. A two-part exploratory study was conducted to evaluate how people naturally guide the motion of a robot and whether an existing gesture vocabulary used for human-human communication can be applied to human-robot interaction. Fourteen participants were first asked to demonstrate ten different navigational commands while interacting with a Pioneer robot using a WoZ technique. In the second part of the study participants were asked to identify eight predefined commands from the U.S. Army vocabulary. The results of this study could serve as a baseline for future development of command vocabulary promoting a more natural and intuitive human-robot interaction style.