  This project aims to motivate research in competitive human-robot interaction
by creating a robot competitor that can challenge human users in certain
scenarios such as physical exercise and games. With this goal in mind, we
introduce the Fencing Game, a human-robot competition used to evaluate both the
capabilities of the robot competitor and user experience. We develop the robot
competitor through iterative multi-agent reinforcement learning and show that
it can perform well against human competitors. Our user study additionally
found that our system was able to continuously create challenging and enjoyable
interactions that significantly increased human subjects' heart rates. The
majority of human subjects considered the system to be entertaining and
desirable for improving the quality of their exercise.
