Intuitiveness Level: Frustration-Based Methodology for Human–Robot Interaction Gesture Elicitation

For robotics to become more accessible to people not specialized in the area, it is of fundamental importance to improve and simplify the way people interact with robots. Despite human-robot interaction (HRI) being an effervescent research area, most of the works published so far on the use of gesture interfaces for human-robot communication do not clearly describe how the used gestures were elicited, thus hindering the reproducibility of those works. Considering this, we propose a new and reproducible Frustration-Based Approach (FBA), scientifically established on previous research, which can be used to obtain an intuitive and robust gesture vocabulary for HRI. To accomplish this, we propose Intuitiveness Level (IL), a score to rank gestures according with its intuitiveness. Using IL, it is possible to conceive a complex vocabulary, allowing an increasing of robustness, since more than one gesture can be associated to a task. In a general sense, the proposed methodology is not limited only for HRI, and it can also be used for human-machine interaction in general. In short, the contributions of this work are: (
i
) A complete methodology to elicit gestures to be used as intuitive communication interface between humans and robots. (
ii)
A metric of intuitiveness which takes into account at least three different characteristics about the elicited gestures.