Understanding On-the-Fly End-User Robot Programming

TL;DR

This study investigates how end users perceive and experience on-the-fly robot programming tools, providing insights to improve design and usability for spontaneous robot interaction creation.

Contribution

It offers empirical insights into end-user experiences with on-the-fly robot programming, highlighting design considerations for better user interaction and system support.

Findings

Users prefer multimodal inputs for expressing intent.

Automatic program synthesizer helps resolve input imprecision.

Insights into the programming process for end users.

Abstract

Novel end-user programming (EUP) tools enable on-the-fly (i.e., spontaneous, easy, and rapid) creation of interactions with robotic systems. These tools are expected to empower users in determining system behavior, although very little is understood about how end users perceive, experience, and use these systems. In this paper, we seek to address this gap by investigating end-user experience with on-the-fly robot EUP. We trained 21 end users to use an existing on-the-fly EUP tool, asked them to create robot interactions for four scenarios, and assessed their overall experience. Our findings provide insight into how these systems should be designed to better support end-user experience with on-the-fly EUP, focusing on user interaction with an automatic program synthesizer that resolves imprecise user input, the use of multimodal inputs to express user intent, and the general process of programming a robot.