The Influence of Gaming Experience, Gender and Other Individual Factors on Robot Teleoperations in VR

— A valid Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) should be effective for the majority of the population. However, gender, gaming experience, or other individual factors are often likely to affect users’ performance when interacting with a robot. In the present study, we measured the performance and perceived workload of participants driving a robot through a pick-and-place task in Virtual Reality (VR) via controller buttons or physical actions. The following individual factors were considered in the analysis: gaming experience, gender, learnability skills, problem solving and trust in technology. Results showed that all the accounted individual factors impacted either performance or perceived demand, but only when guiding the robot via controller buttons. Our findings foster the adoption of more natural ways of teleoperating robots, such as by physical actions, as they demonstrated to be exempt from the influence of individual factors, and are likely to be effective for a broader section of the population.