Cooperative tabletop working for humans and humanoid robots: Early investigations into artifact indication

This paper represents the first steps in investigating issues emerging from a scenario where a robot is used as an avatar interacting around a tabletop surface with the robot being used to represent a remote member of a group. In particular, the effectiveness of the users, present in the immediate vicinity of the tabletop, at identifying which object on the tabletop is being indicated by a full size humanoid robot using our control scheme is investigated. The work is carried out in two phases; the first one focused on the accuracy in identification the object while the second phase focused on the response time of the identification process. The latter experiments are carried out with the introduction of a tabletop visual identification light while using the same robot. Two variants of the experiment were conducted for control and comparison. In variant 1, a human is used instead of the robot and in variant 2, no embodiment is used, that is, only the cursor is used to indicate the artifact. The results obtained indicate that the use of an embodiment, even with restricted degrees of freedom, when using our control scheme for designation has a significant positive effect on the artifact detection time.