An Analysis of Metrics and Methods in Research from Human-Robot Interaction Conferences, 2015-2021

Published

March 6, 2022

Author(s)

Megan Zimmerman, Shelly Bagchi, Jeremy Marvel, Vinh Nguyen, Xiang Li, Katherine Haas, Victoria Koretsky

Abstract

Standardized metrics and methods are critical towards wider adoption of HRI technologies in real-world applications. However, the interdisciplinary nature of HRI creates an inherently decentralized research paradigm that limits the use of standardized metrics for baseline comparisons among studies. This limitation restricts both the real-world adoption and academic replicability of HRI solutions developed by the research community. To identify specific opportunities for reuse of metrics and methods in HRI, this paper presents a comprehensive survey of 1464 papers from the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and the IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (Ro-Man) over seven years. By providing a holistic perspective of the metrological tools leveraged in the current state-of-practice of HRI research, we find that a significant portion of HRI studies use custom surveys, thus limiting baseline comparison. Hence, the analysis in this work aims to advance the field of HRI by identifying specific barriers to adoption of HRI technologies in addition to proposing solutions to overcome existing limitations in the context of metrics and methodologies.

Proceedings Title

Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction

Conference Dates

March 6-12, 2022

Conference Location

Sapporo, JP

Conference Title

ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction

Pub Type

Conferences

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1109/HRI53351.2022.9889595

Local Download

Keywords

performance metrics, test methods, HRI metrology, research trends, reproducibility, replication, robotics

Citation

Zimmerman, M. , Bagchi, S. , Marvel, J. , Nguyen, V. , Li, X. , Haas, K. and Koretsky, V. (2022), An Analysis of Metrics and Methods in Research from Human-Robot Interaction Conferences, 2015-2021, Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, Sapporo, JP, [online], https://doi.org/10.1109/HRI53351.2022.9889595, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=934061 (Accessed October 11, 2025)