Sketching Robot Programs On the Fly

Porfirio, D., L. Stegner, M. Cakmak, A. Sauppé, A. Albarghouthi, and B. Mutlu. Sketching Robot Programs On the Fly. Proceedings of the 2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI ’23), 2023.

Abstract

Service robots for personal use in the home and the workplace require end-user development solutions for swiftly scripting robot tasks as the need arises. Many existing solutions preserve ease, effi- ciency, and convenience through simple programming interfaces or by restricting task complexity. Others facilitate meticulous task design but often do so at the expense of simplicity and efficiency. There is a need for robot programming solutions that reconcile the complexity of robotics with the on-the-fly goals of end-user development. In response to this need, we present a novel, multimodal, and on-the-fly development system, Tabula. Inspired by a formative design study with a prototype, Tabula leverages a combination of spoken language for specifying the core of a robot task and sketching for contextualizing the core. The result is that developers can script partial, sloppy versions of robot programs to be completed and refined by a program synthesizer. Lastly, we demonstrate our anticipated use cases of Tabula via a set of application scenarios.

DOI: 10.1145/3568162.3576982