Simplified industrial robot programming: Effects of errors on multimodal interaction in WoZ experiment

Abstract

This paper presents results of an exploratory study comparing various modalities employed in an industrial-like robot-human shared workplace. Experiments involved 39 participants who used a touch table, a touch display, hand gestures, a 6D pointing device, and a robot arm to show the robot how to assemble a simple product. To rule out a potential dependence of results on the number of misrecognized actions (resulting, e.g., from unreliable gesture recognition), a controlled amount of interaction errors was introduced. A Wizard-of-Oz setting with three user groups differing in the amount of simulated recognition errors helped us to show that hand gestures and 6D pointing are the fastest modalities that are also generally preferred by users for setting parameters of certain robot operations.