Robot initiative increases the rhythm of interaction in a team learning task

We hypothesize that the initiative of a robot during a collaborative task with a human can influence the pace of interaction and the reaction time of the human response to attention cues. We designed a two-phases object learning experiment where the human teaches the robot about the properties of some objects. We compare the effect of the initiator of the task in the teaching phase (human or robot) on the rhythm of the interaction in the verification phase. We measure the reaction time of the human gaze when responding to attention utterances of the robot. Our experiments show that when the robot is the initiator of the learning task, the pace of interaction is higher and the reaction to attention cues faster. ∗A full version of this paper is available as Robot initiative in a team learning task increases the rhythm of interaction but not the perceived engagement. Frontiers in Neurorobotics. Vol 8, No 5, DOI 10.3389/fnbot.2014.00005. The work was partially funded by the European Commission, through the Projects CoDyCo (FP7-ICT-2011-9, No. 600716) and Michelangelo (FP7-ICT No. 288241), and by French National Agency of Research, through the Projects MACSi (ANR-10-BLAN-0216) and EDHHI/SMART (ANR11-IDEX-0004-02). †All the authors are with: Sorbonne Universités, UPMC Univ Paris 06, UMR 7222, Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique (ISIR), F-75005, Paris, France CNRS, UMR 7222, Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique (ISIR), F-75005, Paris, France