How Should People Tell a Robot What They Mean?

Enigma is putting more than 100 real robots online and letting people try different ways of directing them: text, voice, video examples, tapping, dragging and dropping. The robots can draw, handle flasks and even stage sword fights. The company hopes the crowd will help discover a robot interface as natural as a volume knob. That is a better experiment than asking robotics insiders to guess what feels obvious. It also has a built-in distortion: people visiting a robot website are there to play. A warehouse worker with gloves on, or a nurse in a loud room, may give instructions very differently. The interface that wins the demo could still lose the shift. I’d want Enigma to publish which input people chose first, how often they corrected the robot, when they took manual control, and where they simply gave up. The internet may teach robots how people give instructions. It may also teach them how people play with expensive toys. What would you test before calling one interaction style natural?