Kinesthetic Teaching of a Robot over Multiple Sessions: Impacts on Speed and Success.

Social robots are expected to assist us soon in our everyday lives, but they may not be able to meet individuals’ needs without the ability of learning new skills from humans. In a realistic setting such as a home environment, users may not be familiar with how to teach new tasks to a robot. Here, we ask whether it is possible for people without the experience of teaching a robot to become more proficient in doing so through repeated interaction. We show results of a study, where twenty-eight participants, who had never interacted with human-like robots, experienced teaching a set of physical cleaning tasks to a humanoid robot over five sessions. We report significant improvements in the success of kinesthetic teaching over time for some tasks. We also show improvements in the teaching speed over time. The results suggest that by gaining experience in kinesthetic teaching of domestic tasks to a robot over time, without any formal training or external intervention and feedback, non-experts can become more effective robot teachers.