Behavior adaption in a Physically Interactive Robotic Game Scenario

Playing a game that requires physical interaction with people is a challenging human-robot interaction application. Besides the usual abilities expected by autonomous robots (such as: localization, planning, navigation), here the robot should behave in a safe and engaging way, possibly showing to be purposeful and fair, so to make the human player comfortably involved. Among the relevant issues we have faced in this area, we present in this paper how the robot could model the specific player and adapt its behavior to his/her perceived ability, with the aim of obtaining an even game that optimizes the involvement of the player in a flow situation. We implemented our approach in a physically interactive robotic game, and tested it with 52 subjects. The adapting robot was appreciated more than the non-adaptive one.