A longstanding barrier to deploying robots in the real world is the ongoing need to author robot behavior. Remote data collection-particularly crowdsourcing-is increasingly receiving interest. In this paper, we make the argument to scale robot programming to the crowd and present an initial investigation of the feasibility of this proposed method. Using an off-the-shelf visual programming interface, non-experts created simple robot programs for two typical robot tasks (navigation and pick-and-place). Each needed four subtasks with an increasing number of programming statements (if statement, while loop, variables) for successful completion of the programs. Initial findings of an online study (N = 279) indicate that non-experts, after minimal instruction, were able to create simple programs using an off-the-shelf visual programming interface. We discuss our findings and identify future avenues for this line of research.

For effective verbal communication in collaborative tasks, robots need to account for the different perspectives of their human partners when referring to objects in a shared space. For example, when a robot helps its partner find correct pieces while assembling furniture, it needs to understand how its collaborator perceives the world and refer to objects accordingly. In this work, we propose a method to endow robots with perspective-taking abilities while spatially referring to objects. To examine the impact of our proposed method, we report the results of a user study showing that when the objects are spatially described from the users' perspectives, participants take less time to find the referred objects, find the correct objects more often and consider the task easier.

Virtual Reality (VR) can greatly benefit Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) as a tool to effectively iterate across robot designs. However, possible system limitations of VR could influence the results such that they do not fully reflect real-life encounters with robots. In order to better deploy VR in HRI, we need to establish a basic understanding of what the differences are between HRI studies in the real world and in VR. This paper investigates the differences between the real life and VR with a focus on proxemic preferences, in combination with exploring the effects of visual familiarity and spatial sound within the VR experience. Results suggested that people prefer closer interaction distances with a real, physical robot than with a virtual robot in VR. Additionally, the virtual robot was perceived as more discomforting than the real robot, which could result in the differences in proxemics. Overall, these results indicate that the perception of the robot has to be evaluated before the interaction can be studied. However, the results also suggested that VR settings with different visual familiarities are consistent with each other in how they affect HRI proxemics and virtual robot perceptions, indicating the freedom to study HRI in various scenarios in VR. The effect of spatial sound in VR drew a more complex picture and thus calls for more in-depth research to understand its influence on HRI in VR.

Many people who interact with robots in the near future will not have prior experience, and they are likely to intuitively form their first impressions of the robot based on its appearance. This paper explores the effects of component material on people’s perception of the robots in terms of social attributes and willingness to interact. Participants watched videos of three robots with different outer materials: wood, synthetic fur, and plastic. The results showed that people rated the perceived warmth of a plastic robot lower than a wooden or furry robot. Ratings of perceived competence and discomfort did not differ between the three robots.

We explore the effects of robot failure severity (no failure vs. lowimpact vs. high-impact) on people's subjective ratings of the robot. We designed an escape room scenario in which one participant teams up with a remotely-controlled Pepper robot.We manipulated the robot's performance at the end of the game: The robot would either correctly follow the participant's instructions (control condition), the robot would fail but people could still complete the task of escaping the room (low-impact condition), or the robot's failure would cause the game to be lost (high-impact condition). Results showed no difference across conditions for people's ratings of the robot in terms of warmth, competence, and discomfort. However, people in the low-impact condition had significantly less faith in the robot's robustness in future escape room scenarios. Open-ended questions revealed interesting trends that are worth pursuing in the future: people may view task performance as a team effort and may blame their team or themselves more for the robot failure in case of a high-impact failure as compared to the low-impact failure.