How to make a robot guide?
Résumé
We present a service robot able to provide directions to people in a natural way, taking into account and adapting to humans' perspectives. Like a human helping someone to find their way in the street, the robot does not accompany the person to their final destination but moves a little, if necessary, to a few meters to reach a position where visual perspective allows a better configuration to give the route directions. Then, it describes the route to take while pointing towards a place to ground the verbalization efficiently. This paper proposes an implementation of the direction-giving task, considering it as a human-robot joint-action, efficiently entangling the various modalities involved. A robot embedding this implementation has been deployed for several weeks in a real-world environment, interacting with naive users.