Evaluating an Intuitive Teleoperation Platform Explored In a Long-distance Interview

SWoOZ is an intuitive teleoperation platform using a humanoid robot as a proxy between two humans: a remote user teleoperating the robot and a local user interacting directly with it. NAO (Aldebaran) is the proxy used in this study. The remote user controls its head motion with his own movements (live) while his real voice is transmitted to the local user with an unnoticeable lag time. This paper presents a user study of the platform in the context of a long-distance survey and investigates the possible effect of the remote user’s previous experience with robots on the local users’ evaluation of the proxy. Although found useful, likable and satisfying by all the local users, only the ones interviewed by the non-naive user find it averagely credible. Results fail to validate an effect of the remote users ’ previous experience with robots on the local users. Author Keywords Teleoperation; user study; humanoid proxy; social robotics; previous experience with robots; head motion. ACM Classification Keywords Design; experimentation; human factors; measurement. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author. Copyright is held by the owner/authors