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End-User Programming of Manipulator Robots in Situated Tangible Programming Paradigm

Published: 01 March 2018 Publication History

Abstract

While the cost of creating robots is declining, deploying them in industry remains expensive. Widespread use of robots, particularly in smaller industries, is more easily realized if robot programming is accessible to non-programmers. Our research explores techniques to lower the barrier to robot programming. In one such attempt, we propose situated tangible robot programming to program a robot by placing specially designed tangible blocks in its workspace. These blocks are used for annotating objects, locations, or regions, and specifying actions and their ordering. The robot compiles a program by detecting blocks and objects in the environment and grouping them into instructions by solving constraints. We designed a preliminary tangible language and blocks and evaluated the intuitiveness and learnability of the approach. Our user studies provide evidence for the promise of situated tangible programming and identify the challenges to address. In addition to improving the block design and extending the language, we are planning to integrate tangible programming into a holistic ecosystem of a programming environment in future.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    HRI '18: Companion of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
    March 2018
    431 pages
    ISBN:9781450356152
    DOI:10.1145/3173386
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Published: 01 March 2018

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    1. end-user programming
    2. robot programming tools
    3. situated programming
    4. tangible programming

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