What Kind of Player are You? Continuous Learning of a Player Profile for Adaptive Robot Teleoperation

Play is important for child development and robot-assisted play is very popular in Human-Robot Interaction as it creates more engaging and realistic setups for user studies. Adaptive game-play is also an emerging research field and a good way to provide a personalized experience while adapting to individual user’s needs. In this paper, we analyze joystick data and investigate player learning during a robot navigation game. We collected joystick data from healthy adult participants playing a game with our custom robot MyJay, while participants teleoperated the robot to perform goal-directed navigation. We evaluated the performance of both novice and proficient joystick users. Based on this analysis, we propose some robot learning mechanisms to provide a personalized game experience. Our findings can help improving human-robot interaction in the context of teleoperation in general, and could be particularly impactful for children with disabilities who have problems operating off-the-shelf joysticks.