"BIRON, let me show you something": evaluating the interaction with a robot companion

Current research on the interaction with a robot is driven by the desire to build intuitive and natural interaction schemes. In order for our robot BIRON to behave naturally we integrated an attention system that enables the robot to search for and eventually focus on human communication partners by detecting and tracking persons. Via a natural language interface the user can then interact with BIRON and teach him new objects or ask him to follow her. First valuation results from 21 users interacting with the robot indicate that users appreciate the natural language capabilities of BIRON. However, users are very sensitive to speech recognition failures even though all of our subjects had prior experience with speech recognition systems. The results also indicate that feedback on the internal status of the robot is extremely helpful for users.