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User-Friendly Robot Environment for Creation
of Social Scenarios
Tino Lourens
1
and Emilia Barakova
2
1
TiViPE
Kanaaldijk ZW 11, Helmond, The Netherlands
tino@tivipe.com
2
Eindhoven University of Technology
P.O. Box 513, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
e.i.barakova@tue.nl
Abstract.
This paper proposes a user-friendly framework for designing
robot behaviors by users with minimal understanding of programming.
It is a step towards an end-user platform which is meant to be used by
domain specialists for creating social scenarios, i.e. scenarios in which
not high precision of movement is needed but frequent redesign of the
robot behavior is a necessity. We show by a hand shaking experiment
how convincing it is to construct robot behavior in this framework.
1
Introduction
A robot equipped with sensors and actuators is much more than a sensing,
planning, and acting loop, as initially proposed in the 1980s, but merely a set
of real time parallel processes that keeps this natural order of processing. The
control software architecture used for these robots, i.e. the way to put these pieces
together in a functioning system remains a challenging task. The present day
software architectures need to cope with multiple processes running on different
machines, often with different operating systems and hardware. Autonomous
robots have the technical capacity to perform complex behaviors that can be
beneficial to medical therapists, psychologists, designers, and educators. Despite
of the potential of robotics in these areas, too much expertise is required today,
and hence these robots have not yet been wideley used.
Our goal is to overcome this problem by making a programming architecture
that facilitates easy construction of complex behaviors and interaction scenarios.
We address 3 main issues from both technological and user perspectives. The
first main issue is that even the most basic robot competency requires a vast
amount of software. Therefore we developed an architecture that allows a high
degree of re-usability of behaviors on all levels- from simple movement primitives
to behaviors and scenarios. Second, we address the problem of parallel control
over the different robot actuators that can be controlled by simple text-like
commands. Third, since the major potential users of the robots are people with
no or a moderate technical background, the architecture is developed towards an
end-user platform, which implies usage of a graphical programming paradigm.
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