What Is Happening Behind The Wall? : Towards a Better Understanding of a Hidden Robot's Intent By Multimodal Cues

Abstract

Research in human-robot collaboration explores aspects of using interaction modalities and their effect on human perception. Particular attention is paid to intent communication, which is essential for successful interaction and collaboration. This work investigates the effect of using audio, visual, and haptic feedback on intent communication in a human-robot collaboration task where the collaborators do not share a direct line of sight. A user study was conducted in virtual reality with 20 participants. Qualitative and quantitative feedback was collected from all participants. When compared with a baseline of no feedback given to the participants, results show that using visual feedback had a significant impact on task efficiency, user experience, and cognitive load. Audio feedback was slightly less impactful, while haptic feedback had a divisive effect. Multimodal feedback combining the three modalities showed the highest impact compared to the individual modalities, leading to the highest task efficiency and user experience, and the lowest cognitive load.