Figaro: A Tabletop Authoring Environment for Human-Robot Interaction

Abstract

Human-robot interaction designers and developers navigate a complex design space, which creates a need for tools that support intuitive design processes and harness the programming capacity of state-of-the-art authoring environments. We introduce \textit{Figaro}, an expressive tabletop authoring environment for mobile robots, inspired by \textit{shadow puppetry}, that provides designers with a natural, situated representation of human-robot interactions while exploiting the intuitiveness of tabletop and tangible programming interfaces. On the tabletop, Figaro projects a representation of an environment. Users demonstrate sequences of behaviors, or \textit{scenes}, of an interaction by manipulating instrumented figurines that represent the robot and the human. During a scene, Figaro records the movement of figurines on the tabletop and narrations uttered by users. Subsequently, Figaro employs real-time program synthesis to assemble a complete robot program from all scenes provided. Through a user study, we demonstrate the ability of Figaro to support design exploration and development for human-robot interaction.

Authors

DOI

10.1145/3411764.3446864

Paper URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3446864

Video

Conference: CHI 2021

The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2021.acm.org/)

Session: Engineering Real-World Interaction