Abstract
Human-robot interaction designers and developers navigate a complex design space, which creates a need for tools that support intuitive design processes and harness the programming capacity of state-of-the-art authoring environments. We introduce Figaro, an expressive tabletop authoring environment for mobile robots, inspired by shadow puppetry, that provides designers with a natural, situated representation of human-robot interactions while exploiting the intuitiveness of tabletop and tangible programming interfaces. On the tabletop, Figaro projects a representation of an environment. Users demonstrate sequences of behaviors, or scenes, of an interaction by manipulating instrumented figurines that represent the robot and the human. During a scene, Figaro records the movement of figurines on the tabletop and narrations uttered by users. Subsequently, Figaro employs real-time program synthesis to assemble a complete robot program from all scenes provided. Through a user study, we demonstrate the ability of Figaro to support design exploration and development for human-robot interaction.
DOI: 10.1145/3411764.3446864
Bibtex
@inproceedings{porfirio2021figaro,
author = {Porfirio, David J. and Stegner, Laura and Cakmak, Maya and Saupp\'{e}, Allison and Albarghouthi, Aws and Mutlu, Bilge},
title = {Figaro: A Tabletop Authoring Environment for Human-Robot Interaction},
year = {2021},
isbn = {9781450380966},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3446864},
doi = {10.1145/3411764.3446864},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
articleno = {414},
numpages = {15},
keywords = {Authoring environments, human-robot interaction, program synthesis, shadow puppetry, tabletop interfaces},
location = {Yokohama, Japan},
series = {CHI ’21}
}