Characterizing Input Methods for Human-to-Robot Demonstrations

Abstract

Human demonstrations are important in a range of robotics applications, and are created with a variety of input methods. However, the design space for these input methods has not been extensively studied. In this paper, focusing on demonstrations of hand-scale object manipulation tasks to robot arms with two-finger grippers, we identify distinct usage paradigms in robotics that utilize human-to-robot demonstrations, extract abstract features that form a design space for input methods, and characterize existing input methods as well as a novel input method that we introduce, the instrumented tongs. We detail the design specifications for our method and present a user study that compares it against three common input methods: free-hand manipulation, kinesthetic guidance, and teleoperation. Study results show that instrumented tongs provide high quality demonstrations and a positive experience for the demonstrator while offering good correspondence to the target robot.

DOI: 10.1109/HRI.2019.8673328

Bibtex

@inproceedings{praveena2019input,
	doi = {10.1109/hri.2019.8673328},
	url = {https://doi.org/10.1109%2Fhri.2019.8673328},
	year = {2019},
	month = {March},
	publisher = {{IEEE}},
	author = {Pragathi Praveena and Guru Subramani and Bilge Mutlu and Michael Gleicher},
	title = {{Characterizing Input Methods for Human-to-Robot Demonstrations}},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2019 {ACM}/{IEEE} International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction},
	pages = {344--353},
}