Achieving Interaction Fluidity in a Wizard-of-Oz Robotic System: A Prototype for Fluid Error-Correction
For HRI researchers, this work provides a prototype platform addressing known bottlenecks in achieving fluid interaction, but it is incremental as it builds on prior systems.
The paper identifies key criteria for fluid Wizard-of-Oz HRI systems—interruptibility, correction, pollability, latency optimization, and time-accurate reproducibility—and presents a VR simulation environment that meets these criteria to support fluid error correction.
Achieving truly fluid interaction with robots with speech interfaces remains a hard problem, and the experience of current Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) remains laboured and frustrating. Some of the barriers to fluid interaction stem from a lack of a suitable development platform for HRI for improving interaction, even in robotic Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) modes of operation used for data collection and prototyping. Based on previous systems, we propose the properties of interruptibility and correction (IaC), pollability, latency measurement and optimisation and time-accurate reproducibility of actions from logging data as key criteria for a fluid WoZ system to support fluid error correction. We finish by presenting a Virtual Reality (VR) HRI simulation environment for mobile manipulators which meets these criteria.