Exploring adaptive dialogue based on a robot's awareness of human gaze and task progress

When a robot provides direction-as a guide, an assistant, or as an instructor-the robot may have to interact with people of different backgrounds and skill sets. Different people require information adapted to their level of understanding. In this paper, we explore the use of two simple forms of awareness that a robot might use to infer that a person needs further verbal elaboration during a tool selection task. First, the robot could use an eye tracker for inferring whether the person is looking at the robot and thus in need of further elaboration. Second, the robot could monitor delays in the individual's task progress, indicating that he or she could use further elaboration. We investigated the effects of these two types of awareness on performance time, selection mistakes, and the number of questions people asked the robot. We did not observe any obvious benefits of our gaze awareness manipulation. Awareness of task delays did reduce the number of questions participants' asked compared to our control condition but did not significantly reduce the number of selection mistakes. The mixed results of our investigation suggest that more research is necessary before we can understand how awareness of gaze and awareness of task delay can be successfully implemented in human-robot dialogue.