Unpacking Human Teachers' Intentions For Natural Interactive Task Learning
This work addresses the challenge of making interactive task learning more accessible and effective for human teachers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing human-centered perspectives.
The paper tackled the problem of designing robots that can learn tasks through natural human interaction by analyzing human teaching behaviors, revealing that teachers adapt their methods and robots need to accommodate individual styles.
Interactive Task Learning (ITL) is an emerging research agenda that studies the design of complex intelligent robots that can acquire new knowledge through natural human teacher-robot learner interactions. ITL methods are particularly useful for designing intelligent robots whose behavior can be adapted by humans collaborating with them. Various research communities are contributing methods for ITL and a large subset of this research is \emph{robot-centered} with a focus on developing algorithms that can learn online, quickly. This paper studies the ITL problem from a \emph{human-centered} perspective to provide guidance for robot design so that human teachers can naturally teach ITL robots. In this paper, we present 1) a qualitative bidirectional analysis of an interactive teaching study (N=10) through which we characterize various aspects of actions intended and executed by human teachers when teaching a robot; 2) an in-depth discussion of the teaching approach employed by two participants to understand the need for personal adaptation to individual teaching styles; and 3) requirements for ITL robot design based on our analyses and informed by a computational theory of collaborative interactions, SharedPlans.