End-User Programming of Low-and High-Level Actions for Robotic Task Planning

Programming robots for general purpose applications is extremely challenging due to the great diversity of end-user tasks ranging from manufacturing environments to personal homes. Recent work has focused on enabling end-users to program robots using Programming by Demonstration. However, teaching r...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE RO-MAN pp. 1 - 8
Main Authors: Liang, Ying Siu, Pellier, Damien, Fiorino, Humbert, Pesty, Sylvie
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: IEEE 01.10.2019
Subjects:
Benchmark testing
Education
Production facilities
Programming profession
Real-time systems
Robot programming
Robots
System implementation
Usability
User interfaces
ISSN:1944-9437
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Programming robots for general purpose applications is extremely challenging due to the great diversity of end-user tasks ranging from manufacturing environments to personal homes. Recent work has focused on enabling end-users to program robots using Programming by Demonstration. However, teaching robots new actions from scratch that can be reused for unseen tasks remains a difficult challenge and is generally left up to robotic experts. We propose iRoPro, an interactive Robot Programming framework that allows end-users to teach robots new actions from scratch and reuse them with a task planner. In this work we provide a system implementation on a two-armed Baxter robot that (i) allows simultaneous teaching of low-and high-level actions by demonstration, (ii) includes a user interface for action creation with condition inference and modification, and (iii) allows creating and solving previously unseen problems using a task planner for the robot to execute in real-time. We evaluate the generalisation power of the system on six benchmark tasks and show how taught actions can be easily reused for complex tasks. We further demonstrate its usability with a user study (N=21), where users completed eight tasks to teach the robot new actions that are reused with a task planner. The study demonstrates that users with any programming level and educational background can easily learn and use the system.
ISSN:1944-9437
DOI:10.1109/RO-MAN46459.2019.8956327