Robots excel at planning and performing tasks in controlled environments, but poor perception often leads to poor performance in unstructured environments. One typical way of improving robot performance is to give more control to a human operator and then design user interfaces that build the operator's situation awareness. As an alternative, humans can support robot perception to add structure to unstructured environments. We claim that when humans support robot perception, robots can spend more time acting autonomously, which can lead to reduced operator workload and increased overall performance. We present a design process, called perception by proxy, and apply it to a simple manipulation task.

Robot-based autism therapy is a rapidly developing area of research, with a wide variety of robots being developed for use in clinical settings. Specific, detailed requirements for robots and user interfaces are needed to provide guidelines for the creation of robots that more effectively assist therapists in autism therapy. This paper enumerates a set of requirements for a clinical humanoid robot and the associated human interface. The design of two humanoid robots and an intuitive and flexible user interface for use by therapists in the treatment of children with autism is described.