Competitive Physical Human-Robot Game Play

While competitive games have been studied extensively in the AI community for benchmarking purposes, there has only been limited discussion of human interaction with embodied agents under competitive settings. In this work, we aim to motivate research in competitive human-robot interaction (competitive-HRI) by discussing how human users can benefit from robot competitors. We then examine the concepts from game AI that we can adopt for competitive-HRI. Based on these discussions, we propose a robotic system that is designed to support future competitive-HRI research. A human-robot fencing game is also proposed to evaluate a robot's capability in competitive-HRI scenarios. Finally, we present the initial experimental results and discuss possible future research directions.