Enrique Coronado

Pamela Carreno-Medrano, Leimin Tian, Aimee Allen et al.

Robots are increasingly being deployed in public spaces. However, the general population rarely has the opportunity to nominate what they would prefer or expect a robot to do in these contexts. Since most people have little or no experience interacting with a robot, it is not surprising that robots deployed in the real world may fail to gain acceptance or engage their intended users. To address this issue, we examine users' understanding of robots in public spaces and their expectations of appropriate uses of robots in these spaces. Furthermore, we investigate how these perceptions and expectations change as users engage and interact with a robot. To support this goal, we conducted a participatory design workshop in which participants were actively involved in the prototyping and testing of a robot's behaviours in simulation and on the physical robot. Our work highlights how social and interaction contexts influence users' perception of robots in public spaces and how users' design and understanding of what are appropriate robot behaviors shifts as they observe the enactment of their designs.

Enrique Coronado, Fulvio Mastrogiovanni, Gentiane Venture

With the expected adoption of robots able to seamlessly and intuitively interact with people in real-world scenarios, the need arises to provide non-technically-skilled users with easy-to-understand paradigms for customising robot behaviors. In this paper, we present an interaction design robot programming platform for enabling multidisciplinary social robot research and applications. This platform is referred to Node Primitives (NEP) and consists of two main parts. On the one hand, a ZeroMQ and Python-based distributed software framework has been developed to provide inter-process communication and robot behavior specification mechanisms. On the other hand, a web-based end-user programming (EUP) interface has been developed to allow for an easy and intuitive way of programming and executing robot behaviors. In order to evaluate NEP, we discuss the development of a human-robot interaction application using arm gestures to control robot behaviors. A usability test for the proposed EUP interface is also presented.