Improving Fluidity Through Action: A Proposal for a Virtual Reality Platform for Improving Real-World HRI

Achieving truly fluid interaction with robots with speech interfaces remains a hard problem. Despite technical advances in sensors, processors and actuators, the experience of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) remains laboured and frustrating. Some of the barriers to this stem from a lack of a suitable development platform for HRI to improve the interaction, particularly for mobile manipulator robots. In this paper we briefly overview some existing systems and propose a high-fidelity Virtual Reality (VR) HRI simulation environment with Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) cabability applicable to multiple robots including mobile manipulators and social robots.