Communication and gaze behavior in a dyadic collaborative task

Abstract

Humans and robots continue to share an increasing number of spaces, which calls for safe and intuitive interfaces of these robots. Humans and robots interact in numerous ways, an important way is through collaboration. However, this part of human-robot interaction (HRI) is still underdeveloped. This research aims to give more insight into how robots should communicate with humans during collaboration by observing human-human interaction in a collaborative task. Observations were made on how people communicate with each other during a collaborative task and whether they look at their partner’s face when they do. It was also looked at whether verbal communication has influences on task performance in a collaborative task. An experiment was designed in which two participants were asked to work together to recreate a Duplo figure while their gaze behavior was being tracked using the Tobii Pro Glasses 2. Four conditions were used, two in which the figure was either completely visible for both participants or partly hidden by other blocks, and two in which the participants were allowed or not allowed to verbally communicate with each other. Results show that very few the gaze fixations were on the partner’s face. Participants verbally communicated a lot more during the obstructed conditions, and most of the utterances were comments, reactions and questions. The times that the partner’s face was fixated on were not necessarily during communication, but the partner’s face was looked at more often during nonverbal than verbal communication. No significant effect for verbal communication on task performance could be found. Based on these results, robots should not necessarily look at their human partner often. When they do, it could be for nonverbal communication. Verbal communication should be informative of nature, to keep the equal collaboration roles.