A Methodology to Design and Evaluate HRI Teaming Tasks in Robotic Competitions

As social robots become more prominent in our lives, their interaction with humans takes an increasing role, and new collaborative scenarios emerge. This development brings the need to realize robust test methods enabling the design and evaluation of HRI teaming tasks to prove functionality and promote adoption. In this paper, we present a general purpose and repeatable methodology for conducting studies in collaborative HRI in the range of robotic competitions. The methodology includes a step-by-step approach to design HRI teaming tasks tailored to be enacted in a robotic competition and to evaluate the performance of social robots to execute the designed tasks, exploring the relationship between robots’ performance and user perceptions based on the feedback of the users participating to such tasks. We assess the feasibility of the methodology to design and evaluate a HRI teaming task in the context of SciRoc (“Smart CIties RObotics Challenges”) competition, which targets at investigating the impact of social of robots in smart cities.