Issues in Human/Robot Task Structuring and Teaching

Teaching a robot new skills may require that the teacher scaffolds the teaching experience appropriately. However, due to inherent assumptions made by a human teacher the scaffolding process may in some circumstances fail to effectively teach the robot. Here we illustrate this issue in two simple robot teaching exploratory studies and examine the assumptions made by the teacher when teaching the robot. In the first study the human teacher had to reason about robot perceived states in order to provide suitable teaching. In the second study the human teachers had to understand the perceptual constraints of the robot based on the instructions given beforehand by the experimenter and subsequently adapt the guidance given. The results suggest that although the two tasks are quite distinct in their level of complexity a common thread can be observed: people tend to underspecify their teaching. It seems that steps of the explanation are assumed to be known and skipped or not even considered at all. We reflect on the possibility that one of the major challenges in designing robots that are capable interaction partners in these teaching situations is to be able to make them communicate their internal state and current capabilities effectively. Furthermore, we also reflect on designing appropriate behavioral primitives for the robot, corresponding implications on the level of task description and for benefiting from human teaching.