Programming by Demonstration (PbD) is an efficient way for non-experts to teach new skills to a robot. PbD can be carried out in different ways, for instance, by kinesthetic guidance, teleoperation or by using external controls. In this paper, we compare these three ways of controlling a robot in terms of efficiency, effectiveness (success and error rate) and usability. In an industrial assembly scenario, 51 participants carried out peg-in-hole tasks using one of the three control modalities. The results show that kinesthetic guidance produces the best results. In order to test whether the problems during teleoperation are due to the fact that users cannot, like in kinesthetic guidance, switch between control points using traditional teleoperation devices, we designed a new device that allows users to switch between controls for large and small movements. A user study with 15 participants shows that the novel teleoperation device yields almost as good results as kinesthetic guidance.

While robot learning from demonstration comes with great benefits [5], the intuitive interaction between naïve users and robots also poses challenges. For instance, users need to be prevented from causing damage and to be enabled to recover from errors. We studied the error resolution strategies of 28 lay users performing simple assembly tasks via teleoperation of a robotic arm in order to gain insight into the strategies users take. The two most common problems are too much pressure and singularity. Even though users were provided with instructions on how to undo singularity in an instruction video, they did not always recover successfully. In contrast, too much pressure, if noticed, was resolved mostly correctly by lifting the peg or by letting it drop into the hole rather than inserting it. Finally, users were quite clueless about how to resolve self-collision and over-rotation.