Node Primitives: an open end-user programming platform for social robots
This addresses the need for accessible robot programming for multidisciplinary social robot research and applications, but it is incremental as it builds on existing paradigms like ZeroMQ and web interfaces.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling non-technical users to customize social robot behaviors by presenting Node Primitives (NEP), an open platform with a distributed software framework and a web-based end-user programming interface, and evaluates it through a human-robot interaction application and usability test.
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.