Immersive virtual reality-based simulation to support the design of natural human-robot Interfaces for service robotic applications

The increasing popularity of robotics and related applications in modern society makes interacting and communicating with robots of crucial importance. In service robotics, where robots operate to assist human beings in their daily life, natural interaction paradigms capable to foster an ever more intuitive and effective collaboration between involved actors are needed. The aim of this paper is to discuss activities that have been carried out to create a 3D immersive simulation environment able to ease the design and evaluation of natural human-robot interfaces in generic usage contexts. The proposed framework has been exploited to tackle a specific use case represented by a robotics-enabled office scenario and to develop two user interfaces based on augmented reality, speech recognition as well as gaze and body tracking technologies. Then, a user study has been performed to study user experience in the execution of semi-autonomous tasks in the considered scenario though both objective and subjective observations. Besides confirming the validity of the devised approach, the study provided precious indications regarding possible evolutions of both the simulation environment and the service robotic scenario considered.