We detail an approach to planning effective verbal feedback during pairwise human-robot task collaboration. The approach is motivated by social science literature as well as existing work in robotics and is applicable to a variety of task scenarios. It consists of a dynamic, synthetic task implemented in an augmented reality environment. The result is combined robot task control and speech production, allowing the robot to actively participate and communicate with its teammate. A user study was conducted to experimentally validate the efficacy of the approach on a task in which a single user collaborates with an autonomous robot. The results demonstrate that the approach is capable of improving both objective measures of team performance and the user's subjective evaluation of both the task and the robot as a teammate.

In many collocated human-robot interaction scenarios, robots are required to accurately and unambiguously indicate an object or point of interest in the environment. Realistic, cluttered environments containing many visually salient targets can present a challenge for the observer of such pointing behavior. In this paper, we describe an experiment and results detailing the effects of visual saliency and pointing modality on human perceptual accuracy of a robot's deictic gestures (head and arm pointing) and compare the results to the perception of human pointing.

New approaches to rehabilitation and health care have developed due to advances in technology and human robot interaction (HRI). Socially assistive robotics (SAR) is a subcategory of HRI that focuses on providing assistance through hands-off interactions. We have developed a SAR architecture that facilitates multiple task-oriented interactions between a user and a robot agent. The architecture accommodates a variety of inputs, tasks, and interaction modalities that are used to provide relevant, real-time feedback to the participant. We have implemented the architecture and validated its technological feasibility in a small pilot study in which a SAR agent led three post-stroke individuals through an exercise scenario. In the following, we present our architecture design, and the results of the feasibility study.