In this paper, we explore the design and use of conversational telepresence robots to help homebound older adults interact with the external world. An initial needfinding study (N=8) using video vignettes revealed older adults’ experiential needs for robot-mediated remote experiences such as exploration, reminiscence and social participation. We then designed a prototype system to support these goals and conducted a technology probe study (N=11) to garner a deeper understanding of user preferences for remote experiences. The study revealed user interactive patterns in each desired experience, highlighting the need of robot guidance, social engagements with the robot and the remote bystanders. Our work identifies a novel design space where conversational telepresence robots can be used to foster meaningful interactions in the remote physical environment. We offer design insights into the robot’s proactive role in providing guidance and using dialogue to create personalized, contextualized and meaningful experiences.

Novel end-user programming (EUP) tools enable on-the-fly (i.e., spontaneous, easy, and rapid) creation of interactions with robotic systems. These tools are expected to empower users in determining system behavior, although very little is understood about how end users perceive, experience, and use these systems. In this paper, we seek to address this gap by investigating end-user experience with on-the-fly robot EUP. We trained 21 end users to use an existing on-the-fly EUP tool, asked them to create robot interactions for four scenarios, and assessed their overall experience. Our findings provide insight into how these systems should be designed to better support end-user experience with on-the-fly EUP, focusing on user interaction with an automatic program synthesizer that resolves imprecise user input, the use of multimodal inputs to express user intent, and the general process of programming a robot.

We present a participatory design method to design human-robot interactions with older adults and its application through a case study of designing an assistive robot for a senior living facility. The method, called Situated Participatory Design (sPD), was designed considering the challenges of working with older adults and involves three phases that enable designing and testing use scenarios through realistic, iterative interactions with the robot. In design sessions with nine residents and three caregivers, we uncovered a number of insights about sPD that help us understand its benefits and limitations. For example, we observed how designs evolved through iterative interactions and how early exposure to the robot helped participants consider using the robot in their daily life. With sPD, we aim to help future researchers to increase and deepen the participation of older adults in designing assistive technologies.

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, efficiency, 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.

Robots hold significant promise to assist with providing care to an aging population and to help overcome increasing caregiver demands. Although a large body of research has explored robotic assistance for individuals with disabilities and age-related challenges, this past work focuses primarily on building robotic capabilities for assistance and has not yet fully considered how these capabilities could be used by professional caregivers. To better understand the workflows and practices of caregivers who support aging populations and to determine how robotic assistance can be integrated into their work, we conducted a field study using ethnographic and co-design methods in a senior living community. From our results, we created a set of design opportunities for robotic assistance, which we organized into three different parts: supporting caregiver workflows, adapting to resident abilities, and providing feedback to all stakeholders of the interaction.

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.

Abstract Systematic testing of autonomous vehicles operating in complex real-world scenarios is a difficult and expensive problem. We present Paracosm, a framework for writing systematic test scenarios for autonomous driving simulations. Paracosm allows users to programmatically describe complex driving situations with specific features, e.g., road layouts and environmental conditions, as well as reactive temporal behaviors of other cars and pedestrians. A systematic exploration of the state space, both for visual features and for reactive interactions with the environment is made possible. We define a notion of test coverage for parameter configurations based on combinatorial testing and low dispersion sequences. Using fuzzing on parameter configurations, our automatic test generator can maximize coverage of various behaviors and find problematic cases. Through empirical evaluations, we demonstrate the capabilities of Paracosm in programmatically modeling parameterized test environments, and in finding problematic scenarios.