Prosody for Intuitive Robotic Interface Design: It's Not What You Said, It's How You Said It

In this paper, we investigate the use of 'prosody' (the musical elements ofspeech) as a communicative signal for intuitive human-robot interactioninterfaces. Our approach, rooted in Research through Design (RtD), examines theapplication of prosody in directing a quadruped robot navigation. We involvedten team members in an experiment to command a robot through an obstacle courseusing natural interaction. A human operator, serving as the robot's sensory andprocessing proxy, translated human communication into a basic set of navigationcommands, effectively simulating an intuitive interface. During our analysis ofinteraction videos, when lexical and visual cues proved insufficient foraccurate command interpretation, we turned to non-verbal auditory cues.Qualitative evidence suggests that participants intuitively relied on prosodyto control robot navigation. We highlight specific distinct prosodic constructsthat emerged from this preliminary exploration and discuss their pragmaticfunctions. This work contributes a discussion on the broader potential ofprosody as a multifunctional communicative signal for designing futureintuitive robotic interfaces, enabling lifelong learning and personalization inhuman-robot interaction.