Learning to Communicate Functional States with Nonverbal Expressions for Improved Human-Robot Collaboration

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Roy, Liam, Kulic, Dana, Croft, Elizabeth
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866917654210543616
author Roy, Liam
Kulic, Dana
Croft, Elizabeth
author_facet Roy, Liam
Kulic, Dana
Croft, Elizabeth
contents Collaborative robots must effectively communicate their internal state to humans to enable a smooth interaction. Nonverbal communication is widely used to communicate information during human-robot interaction, however, such methods may also be misunderstood, leading to communication errors. In this work, we explore modulating the acoustic parameter values (pitch bend, beats per minute, beats per loop) of nonverbal auditory expressions to convey functional robot states (accomplished, progressing, stuck). We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm based on noisy human feedback to produce accurately interpreted nonverbal auditory expressions. The proposed approach was evaluated through a user study with 24 participants. The results demonstrate that: 1. Our proposed RL-based approach is able to learn suitable acoustic parameter values which improve the users' ability to correctly identify the state of the robot. 2. Algorithm initialization informed by previous user data can be used to significantly speed up the learning process. 3. The method used for algorithm initialization strongly influences whether participants converge to similar sounds for each robot state. 4. Modulation of pitch bend has the largest influence on user association between sounds and robotic states.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_19253
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning to Communicate Functional States with Nonverbal Expressions for Improved Human-Robot Collaboration
Roy, Liam
Kulic, Dana
Croft, Elizabeth
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Human-Computer Interaction
68T40
Collaborative robots must effectively communicate their internal state to humans to enable a smooth interaction. Nonverbal communication is widely used to communicate information during human-robot interaction, however, such methods may also be misunderstood, leading to communication errors. In this work, we explore modulating the acoustic parameter values (pitch bend, beats per minute, beats per loop) of nonverbal auditory expressions to convey functional robot states (accomplished, progressing, stuck). We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm based on noisy human feedback to produce accurately interpreted nonverbal auditory expressions. The proposed approach was evaluated through a user study with 24 participants. The results demonstrate that: 1. Our proposed RL-based approach is able to learn suitable acoustic parameter values which improve the users' ability to correctly identify the state of the robot. 2. Algorithm initialization informed by previous user data can be used to significantly speed up the learning process. 3. The method used for algorithm initialization strongly influences whether participants converge to similar sounds for each robot state. 4. Modulation of pitch bend has the largest influence on user association between sounds and robotic states.
title Learning to Communicate Functional States with Nonverbal Expressions for Improved Human-Robot Collaboration
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Human-Computer Interaction
68T40
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.19253