How Long Is a Moment: The Perception and Reality of Task-Related Absences

We have investigated actual and perceived human performance associated with a simple task involving walking and applied the developed knowledge to a human-robot interaction. Based on experiments involving walking at a “purposeful and comfortable” pace, parameters were determined for a trapezoidal model of walking: starting from standing still, accelerating to a constant pace, walking at a constant pace, and decelerating to a stop. We also collected data on humans’ evaluation of the accomplishment of a simple task involving walking: determining the transitions from having taken too short a period of time to an appropriate time and from having taken an appropriate time to having taken too long. People were found to be accurate in estimating the task duration for short tasks, but to underestimate the duration of longer tasks. This information was applied to a human-robot interaction involving a human leaving for a “moment” and the robot knows how long the task should take and how time is evaluated by a human.

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