Evaluating Robot Behavior in Response to Natural Language.

Human-robot teaming can be improved if a robot»s actions meet human users» expectations. The goal of this research is to determine what variations of robot actions in response to natural language match human judges» expectations in a series of tasks. We conducted a study with 21 volunteers that analyzed how a virtual robot behaved when executing eight navigation instructions from a corpus of human-robot dialogue. Initial findings suggest that movement more accurately meets human expectation when the robot (1) navigates with an awareness of its environment and (2) demonstrates a sense of self-safety.