Crowd-Sourcing Real-World Human-Robot Dialogue and Teamwork through Online Multiplayer Games

We present an innovative approach for large-scale data collection in human-robot interaction research through the use of online multi-player games. By casting a robotic task as a collaborative game, we gather thousands of examples of human-human interactions online, and then leverage this corpus of action and dialogue data to create contextually relevant social and task-oriented behaviors for human-robot interaction in the real world. We demonstrate our work in a collaborative search and retrieval task requiring dialogue, action synchronization, and action sequencing between the human and robot partners. A user study performed at the Boston Museum of Science shows that the autonomous robot exhibits many of the same patterns of behavior that were observed in the online data set and survey results rate the robot similarly to human partners in several critical measures.