Environment Modification in Simulated Navigation Tasks for Human - Robot Interaction ( Invited Paper )

This article describes a novel approach to humanrobot interaction, in which a user modifies a robot’s environment to constrain its actions, rather than programming its controller. An HRI simulation of a maze navigation task is presented. An empirical evaluation shows that for this task, users prefer an environment modification strategy rather than a programming strategy as the difficulty of the task increases. Further, user alternation between the two types of strategy follows a clear pattern, in which users begin with programming actions and end with environment modification actions, suggesting that these action types play different roles in problem solving. An abstract model of the use of environment modification for more general navigation tasks is also presented. Copyright c © 2004-2005 Yang’s Scientific Research Institute, LLC. All rights reserved.