Interactive Social Agents Simulation Tool for Designing Choreographies for Human-Robot-Interaction Research

Overview & Synopsis

Social robotics research requires the replicability of the experiments used to validate new technical or scientific claims. However, humans behavior is difficult to replicate. We have designed and implemented a system to simulate interactive agents that can be perceived by a robot in a robotic simulator. These agents can exhibit social behaviour in human group movement, for example, by talking in pairs. These humans are interactive with the robot and can be perceived so that the robot can react to their behavior. The humans can be choreographed to create high-level social behaviours such as waiting for an elevator, getting in and out of it, or standing in front of a store window and moving together to the next one. The tool would provide metrics to evaluate the robot's performance in defined social situations.