Visual robot choreography for clinicians

Abstract

Robots show potential to be helpful in therapy for children with autism, but there are open questions on how to control the robots. Because clinicians typically lack programming experience, they must currently ask a programmer to program the robots. We hypothesize that clinicians are able to program robots sufficiently for their needs if the programming representation is understandable to them. We are designing a user interface tailored to clinician needs that enables clinicians to program robots. Clinicians, computer scientists, and mechanical engineers are collaboratively involved in the design process. The first step is enabling clinicians to choreograph existing robot actions into a useful overall robot behavior. We demonstrate that clinicians are capable of choreographing actions with a pilot study.