Applying the Wizard-of-Oz Technique to Multimodal Human-Robot Dialogue

Our overall program objective is to provide more natural ways for soldiers to interact and communicate with robots, much like how soldiers communicate with other soldiers today. We describe how the Wizard-of-Oz (WOz) method can be applied to multimodal human-robot dialogue in a collaborative exploration task. While the WOz method can help design robot behaviors, traditional approaches place the burden of decisions on a single wizard. In this work, we consider two wizards to stand in for robot navigation and dialogue management software components. The scenario used to elicit data is one in which a human-robot team is tasked with exploring an unknown environment: a human gives verbal instructions from a remote location and the robot follows them, clarifying possible misunderstandings as needed via dialogue. We found the division of labor between wizards to be workable, which holds promise for future software development.