Learning to Manipulate Objects: A Quantitative Evaluation of Motionese

One dream of robotics research is to build robot companions that can interact outside the lab in real world environments such as private homes. There has been good progress on many components needed for such a robot companion, but only few systems are documented in the literature that actually integrate a larger number of components leading to a more natural and human-like interaction with such a robot. However, only the integration of many components on the same robot allows us to study embodied interaction and leads to new insights on how to improve the overall appearance of such a robot companion. Towards this end, we present the Bielefeld Robot Companion BIRON as an integration platform for studying embodied interaction. Reporting different stages of the alternating development and evaluation process, we argue that an integrated and actually running system is necessary to assess human needs and demands under real life conditions and to determine what functions are still missing. This interplay between evaluation and development stimulates the development process as well as the design of appropriate evaluation metrics. Moreover, such constant evaluations of the system help identify problematic aspects that need to be solved before sophisticated robot companions can be successfully evaluated in long-term user studies.