Validating Virtual Reality for Studying Multimodal Human-Robot Interaction in Socially Aware Robot Navigation

Engineering notes

Engineering notes will be added by the Robot Papers editorial team.

Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) offers a flexible and controllable platform for studying human-robot interaction. Prior work has explored VR for socially aware robot navigation. However, whether VR captures the multimodal interaction dynamics observed in real-world human-robot co-navigation remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we present a VR prototype and evaluate its suitability for studying multimodal human-robot interaction (HRI) in socially aware navigation. Specifically, we investigate whether VR preserves the multimodal interaction dynamics observed in real-world human-robot co-navigation. We conducted a within-subjects study (N = 21) in which participants interacted with a PR2 mobile manipulator robot in both a motion capture equipped arena and its virtual replica in an immersive VR environment. Two common co-navigation scenarios were examined : orthogonal crossing and pass-by interactions. Participants evaluated the robot's perceived social awareness and interaction comfort, while trajectory and head-orientation data were analysed to examine behavioral responses during the interaction. Our results show that participants perceive the robot's socially aware navigation similarly in VR and in the real world. Furthermore, VR captures human interaction behaviors in ways consistent with real-world observations. These findings suggest that VR can be a reliable and flexible platform for studying richer multimodal behaviors in social navigation and HRI.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

Comments