Humans' Spatial Perspective-Taking When Interacting with a Robotic Arm

Perceiving the environment from another person's perspective, in other words, being in someone else's shoes spatially, is not always an easy task. Perspective-taking can be even more challenging when working with a robot as a collaborator. The study reported here aims at investigating humans' level 2 spatial perspective-taking performance when interacting with a collaborative robotic arm through a novel in-person experiment. First, a robotic arm drew ambiguous shapes on a whiteboard and participants had to answer questions that require performing spatial perspective-taking. A metric was used to compute a score based on their responses. Second, participants completed the PTSOT, a test measuring spatial orientation and perspective-taking ability. The results revealed a correlation between the scores computed using our metric and those obtained in the PTSOT. This suggests the efficiency of our new setup and associated evaluation metric in assessing spatial perspective-taking skills in a human-robot interaction context, as well as the validity of our findings, in line with prior studies on perspective-taking.