Abstract
Evaluating human-robot social interactions in a rigorous manner is notoriously difficult: studies are either conducted in labs with constrained protocols to allow for robust measurements and a degree of replicability, but at the cost of ecological validity; or in the wild, which leads to superior experimental realism, but often with limited replicability and at the expense of rigorous interaction metrics. We introduce a novel interaction paradigm, designed to elicit rich and varied social interactions while having desirable scientific properties (replicability, clear metrics, possibility of either autonomous or Wizard-of-Oz robot behaviours). This paradigm focuses on child-robot interactions, and builds on a sandboxed free-play environment. We present the rationale and design of the interaction paradigm, its methodological and technical aspects (including the open-source implementation of the software platform), as well as two large open datasets acquired with this paradigm, and meant to act as experimental baselines for future research.
Publication Date
2017-12-06
Publication Title
arXiv
Embargo Period
2020-12-23
Organisational Unit
School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics
Keywords
cs.RO, cs.HC
Recommended Citation
Lemaignan, S., Edmunds, C., Senft, E., & Belpaeme, T. (2017) 'The Free-play Sandbox: a Methodology for the Evaluation of Social Robotics and a Dataset of Social Interactions', arXiv, . Retrieved from https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/secam-research/1246
