Head Pose for Object Deixis in VR-Based Human-Robot Interaction

Modern robotics heavily relies on machine learning and has a growing need for training data. Advances and commercialization of virtual reality (VR) present an opportunity to use VR as a tool to gather such data for human-robot interactions. We present the Robot Interaction in VR simulator, which allows human participants to interact with simulated robots and environments in real-time. We are particularly interested in spoken interactions between the human and robot, which can be combined with the robot’s sensory data for language grounding. To demonstrate the utility of the simulator, we describe a study which investigates whether a user’s head pose can serve as a proxy for gaze in a VR object selection task. Participants were asked to describe a series of known objects, providing approximate labels for the focus of attention. We demonstrate that using a concept of gaze derived from head pose can be used to effectively narrow the set of objects that are the target of participants’ attention and linguistic descriptions.