Investigating Fluidity for Human-Robot Interaction with Real-time, Real-world Grounding Strategies

We present a simple real-time, real-world grounding framework, and a system which implements it in a simple robot, allowing investigation into different grounding strategies. We put particular focus on the grounding effects of non-linguistic task-related actions. We experiment with a trade-off between the fluidity of the grounding mechanism with the 'safety' of ensuring task success. The framework consists of a combination of interactive Harel statecharts and the Incremental Unit framework. We evaluate its in-robot implementation in a study with human users and find that in simple grounding situations, a model allowing greater fluidity is perceived to have better understanding of the user's speech.