Designing user-centric programming aids for kinesthetic teaching of collaborative robots

Abstract

Just as end-user programming has helped make computer programming accessible for a variety of users and settings, end-user robot programming has helped empower end-users without specialized knowledge or technical skills to customize robotic assistance that meets diverse environmental constraints and task requirements. While end-user robot programming methods such as kinesthetic teaching have introduced direct approaches to task demonstration that allow users to avoid working with traditional programming constructs, our formative study revealed that everyday people still have difficulties in specifying effective robot programs using these methods due to challenges in understanding robot kinematics and programming without situated context and assistive system feedback. These findings informed our development of Demoshop, an interactive robot programming tool that includes user-centric programming aids to help end-users author and edit task demonstrations. To evaluate the effectiveness of Demoshop, we conducted a user study comparing task performance and user experience associated with using Demoshop relative to a widely used commercial baseline interface. Results of our study indicate that users have greater task efficiency while authoring robot programs and maintain stronger mental models of the system when using Demoshop compared to the baseline interface. Our system implementation and study have implications for the further development of assistance in end-user robot programming.