Gracefully Mitigating Communication Protocol Reuse Breakdowns

In our current research, we assessed the feasibility of integrating a dual coded robot’s feedback. Dual coded feedback consists of the robot combining it visible behaviors (e.g.: the robot’s movement) with auditory icons which we refer to as Inarticulate Utterances (IUs). In our study, we investigate whether using dual coded robot’s feedback during the HumanRobot Interaction (HRI) may help maintaining the rules of interaction (protocol) that are previously established in an adaptive way between the human and the robot in past HRI instances and which eventually can be forgotten after a long period of not using the robot. We compare dual coded feedback with other alternatives which are baseline condition in which only the robot’s visible behavior is the only afforded feedback for the human and another manipulation condition that consists on changing the IUs version during the second HRI instance when the human is supposed to remember the Previously Established Communication Protocol (PECP). As expected, using dual coded feedback afforded better interaction outcomes in terms of protocol remembrance and subjective evaluation of the HRI in comparison to the baseline and manipulation conditions. 