Accelerating Robot Development Through Integral Analysis of Human–Robot Interaction

The development of interactive robots is a complicated process, involving a plethora of psychological, technical, and contextual influences. To design a robot capable of operating ldquointelligentlyrdquo in everyday situations, one needs a profound understanding of human-robot interaction (HRI). We propose an approach based on integral analysis of multimodal data to pursue this understanding and support interdisciplinary research and development in the field of robotics. To adopt this approach, a software tool named interaction debugger was developed that features user-friendly navigation, browsing, searching, viewing, and annotation of data; it enables fine-grained inspection of the HRI. In four case studies, we demonstrated how our analysis approach aids the development process of interactive robots.