Evaluating Human-Robot Interaction

Abstract

The experience of interacting with a robot has been shown to be very different in comparison to people’s interaction experience with other technologies and artifacts, and often has a strong social or emotional component— a difference that poses potential challenges related to the design and evaluation of HRI. In this paper we explore this difference, and its implications on evaluating HRI. We out- line how this difference is due in part to the general com- plexity of robots’ overall context of interaction, related to their dynamic presence in the real world and their tendency to invoke a sense of agency. We suggest that due to these differences HCI evalua- tion methods should be applied to HRI with care, and we present a survey of select HCI evaluation techniques from the perspective of the unique challenges of robots. We pro- pose a view on social interaction with robots that we call the holistic interaction experience, and introduce a set of three perspectives for exploring social interaction with ro- bots: visceral factors of interaction, social mechanics, and social structures. We demonstrate how our three perspec- tives can be used in practice, both as guidelines to discuss and categorize robot interaction, and as a component in the evaluation process. Further, we propose an original heuristic for brainstorming various possibilities of interaction experi- ences based on a concept we call the interaction experience map.