Competition Design to Evaluate Cognitive Functions in Human-Robot Interaction Based on Immersive VR

While RoboCup Soccer and RoboCup Rescue have simulation leagues, RoboCup@Home does not. One reason for the difficulty of creating a RoboCup@Home simulation is that robot users must be present. Almost all existing tasks in RoboCup@Home depend on communication between humans and robots. For human-robot interaction in a simulator, a user model or avatar should be designed and implemented. Furthermore, behavior of real humans often lead to unfair conditions between participant teams. Since the one-shot trial is the standard evaluation style in the current RoboCup, human behavior is quite difficult to evaluate from a statistical point of view. We propose a novel software platform for statistically evaluating human-robot interaction in competitions. With the help of cloud computing and an immersive VR system, cognitive and social human-robot interaction can be carried out and measured as objective data in a VR environment. In this paper, we explain the novel platform and propose two kinds of competition design with the aim of evaluating social and cognitive human-robot interaction from a statistical point of view.