A robotic game to evaluate interfaces used to show and teach visual objects to a robot in real world condition

In this paper, we present a real world user study of 4 interfaces designed to teach new visual objects to a social robot. This study was designed as a robotic game in order to maintain the user´s motivation during the whole experiment. Among the 4 interfaces 3 were based on mediator objects such as an iPhone, a Wiimote and a laser pointer. They also provided the users with different kind of feedback of what the robot is perceiving. The fourth interface was a gesture based interface with a Wizard-of-Oz recognition system added to compare our mediator interfaces with a more natural interaction. Here, we specially studied the impact the interfaces have on the quality of the learning examples and the usability. We showed that providing non-expert users with a feedback of what the robot is perceiving is needed if one is interested in robust interaction. In particular, the iPhone interface allowed non-expert users to provide better learning examples due to its whole visual feedback. Furthermore, we also studied the user´s gaming experience and found that in spite of its lower usability, the gestures interface was stated as entertaining as the other interfaces and increases the user´s feeling of cooperating with the robot. Thus, we argue that this kind of interface could be well-suited for robotic game.