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 Figaro, an expressive tabletop authoring environment for mobile robots, inspired by 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 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.

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{porfirio2021figaro,
  title = {Figaro: A tabletop authoring environment for human-robot interaction},
  author = {Porfirio, David J and Stegner, Laura and Cakmak, Maya and Saupp{\'e}, Allison and Albarghouthi, Aws and Mutlu, Bilge},
  year = {2021},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
  type = {conference},
  pages = {1--15},
  isbn = {9781450380966},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  doi = {10.1145/3411764.3446864},
  articleno = {414},
  numpages = {15},
  keywords = {tabletop interfaces, shadow puppetry, program synthesis, human-robot interaction, Authoring environments},
  location = {Yokohama, Japan},
  series = {CHI '21}
}