Steps Towards Best Practices For Robot Videos
This work tackles the problem of inconsistent and potentially misleading robot video practices for the robotics research community, though it is incremental as it presents a draft for feedback rather than a finalized standard.
The paper addresses the lack of formal guidelines for creating robot videos in research by proposing a starting set of maxims and a checklist to ensure truthful representation of robot capabilities, based on community examples and self-critique.
There are unwritten guidelines for how to make robot videos that researchers learn from their advisors and pass onto their students. We believe that it is important for the community to collaboratively discuss and develop a standard set of best practices when making robot. We suggest a starting set of maxims for best robot video practices, and highlight positive examples from the community and negative examples only from videos made by the authors of this article. In addition, we offer a checklist that we hope can act as an document that can be given to robotic researchers to inform them of how to make robot videos that truthfully characterize what a robot can and can not do. We consider this a first draft, and are looking for feedback from the community as we refine and grow our maxims and checklist.