Teaching a Humanoid: A User Study on Learning by Demonstration with HOAP-3

This article reports on the results of a user study investigating the satisfaction of naïve users conducting two learning by demonstration tasks with the HOAP-3 robot. The main goal of this study was to gain insights on how to ensure a successful as well as satisfactory experience for naïve users. Participants performed two tasks: They taught the robot to (1) push a box, and to (2) close a box. The user study was accompanied by three pre-structured questionnaires, addressing the users’ satisfaction with HOAP-3, the user’s affect toward the robot following from the interaction, and the user’s attitude towards robots. Furthermore, a retrospective think aloud was conducted to gain a better understanding of what influences the users’ satisfaction in learning by demonstration tasks. The results stress that learning by demonstration is a promising approach for naïve users to learn the interaction with a robot, as a high task completion and final satisfaction rate could be observed. Moreover, the short term interaction with HOAP-3 led to a positive affect higher than the normative average on half of the female users.