Location Label Speech Options Improve Robot Operator Performance

Abstract

Operators increasingly use speech communication to direct robots. Thus, research on how robot operators may most effectively use speech communication is increasingly important. If certain types of speech communication increase performance then it is incumbent on robot designers to produce robots that allow for these types of communication. An experiment was conducted as a follow up to a previous experiment (Cassenti, Kelley, Swoboda, & Patton, 2009) to test whether participants who were given the ability to use certain location labels performed better than those who could only give direction commands (i.e., turn right, move forward). The results indicated that robot performance was improved when participants could direct a robot using location labels. We interpret these results to suggest that robots which are designed to perform indoor navigation have improved performance when participants can use location labels for structural parts of a building (i.e., doors, halls, and rooms with numerical labels). We recommend that the robotic platform used in the present study be developed to recognize these location labels by incorporating visual recognition algorithms and map incorporation skills.