A human-centric API for programming socially interactive robots

Abstract

Abstract-Whilst robots are increasingly being deployed as social agents, it is still difficult to program them to interact socially. This is because current programming tools either require programmers to work at a low level or lack features needed to create certain aspects of social interaction. High level, domain specific tools with features designed specifically to meet the requirements of social interaction have the potential to ease the creation of social applications. We present a domain specific application programming interface (API) that is designed to meet the requirements of social interaction. The Cognitive Dimensions Framework was used as a design tool during the design process and the API was validated by implementing an exemplar application. The evaluation of the API showed that programmers with no robotics knowledge were positively impressed by the notation and that its organization, domain specific interfaces and object oriented nature positively affected several Cognitive Dimensions.

Designing an API at an appropriate abstraction level for programming social robot applications

“…Second, participants had difficulty using an imperative state machine to orchestrate primitives into a social interaction scenario; over 60% of the specific negative responses (31 of 53) related to this. The second theme is discussed in a separate paper [50]; because it relates to a different research question than those in this paper 3 . The following paragraphs discuss how the APIs domain specific interfaces affected usability in the context of the Cognitive Dimensions of Notations.…”

“…The APIs primitives were based on a taxonomy of primitives that we developed from researchers' descriptions of robot behaviour, this is presented in [50].…”

“…This was not currently possible with the Robot classes' say_to method which can only make the robot gesture whilst it is speaking. To address (Section 4.2.7) and the finite state machine (described in another paper [50]). this the say_to method would need to be split into finer grained methods that enable independent control of speech, gaze, gestures and expressions.…”

Towards a Modular and Distributed End-User Development Framework for Human-Robot Interaction

“…To this aim, programming tools for social and service robots must avoid the use of many low-level programming primitives. Instead, they must provide a set of reusable and easy to understand building blocks (denoted primitives) representing social skills which end-user can easily understand, combine and re-use [34]. These social skills are typically related to text-to-speech, animations, gestures, and the use of gaze.…”