Using Heuristic Evaluation for Human-Humanoid Robot Interaction in the Soccer Robotics Domain

In the field of human-computer interaction (HCI), one of the most popular inspection-based methods for evaluating usability is the Heuristic Evaluation (HE) in gauging and improving the interaction design. With mobile robots exhibiting a stronger presence in commercial markets in the last few years, very little work has been done with heuristic evaluation in human-robot interaction discipline. Heuristic evaluation requires application of an established set of heuristics (guidelines) as they review a given system. This paper focuses on deriving a set of heuristics for use with human-humanoid robot interaction (HHRI) system in soccer robotics domain. Our derived set of HHRI heuristics can be readily adopted by humanoid soccer robotic researchers with little or no evaluation experience. Experiments were performed with the derived set of HHRI heuristics and adequate results were obtained exhibiting improvement in soccer performance of the humanoid robot.