A New Metrology of Usability Test for New Communication Media-Humanoid Robot System

The author interprets humanoid robots as a new communication medium with social interaction. Social interaction is essential for humanoid robots, because such robots are getting more common in social and home environments, such as a pet robot in the living room, a service robot at the office, or a robot serving people at a party. Social skills of such robots require robust, complex perceptual abilities: for example, it identifies people in the room, pays attention to their voices and looks at them to identify visually, and associates voice and visual images. Intelligent behavior of social interaction should emerge from rich channels of input sensors: visual, auditory, tactile, and others. The capabilities of humanoid robots and new communication media motivate us to develop a new remote home appliance control system HRUN (humanoid robots and ubiquitous network system, detailed in Appendix). In addition, the HRUN as a "network robots" example system of convergence of ubiquitous networks and robots is interpreted. In this paper, we describe two topics. First, we describe the results of usability test about the HRUN to over 30 students. The result shows "students want to use the HRUN and expect humanoid robot as a new communication medium. " Second, we describe a limitation of conventional metrology of usability tests. For example, students misunderstand "humanoid robot simulates a human motion - stand straight", since they able to understand the robot\´s rough motion and think "it\´s not perfect, but they are getting there". Finally, the author describes the importance of a new metrology of usability tests for the new medium