Modeling Human-Robot Collaboration in a Simulated Environment

In this paper, we describe a project that explores an open-sourced enhanced robot simulator SIGVerse towards researching a social human-robot interaction. Research on high-level social human-robot interaction systems that include collaboration and emotional intercommunication between people and robots requires a considerable amount of data based on embodied interaction experiments. However, the cost of developing real robots and performing many experiments can be very high. On the other hand, virtual robot simulators are very limited in terms of interaction between simulated robots and real people. Thus we propose using an enhanced human-robot interaction simulator SIGVerse that enables users to join the virtual world occupied by simulated robots through an immersive user interface. In this paper, we describe a collaborative human-robot interaction task where a virtual human agent is controlled remotely by human subjects to interact with an automatic virtual robot with implemented artificial emotional reactions. Our project sets the first steps to explore the potential of using an enhanced human-robot interaction simulator to build socially interactive robots that can serve in educational, team building, and collaborative task solving applications.