Geppetto: Enabling Semantic Design of Expressive Robot Behaviors

Ruta Desai, Fraser Anderson, Justin Matejka, Stelian Coros, James McCann, George Fitzmaurice, Tovi Grossman
January 2019 · Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Abstract

Expressive robots are useful in many contexts, from industrial to entertainment applications. However, designing expressive robot behaviors requires editing a large number of unintuitive control parameters. We present an interactive, data-driven system that allows editing of these complex parameters in a semantic space. Our system combines a physics-based simulation that captures the robot's motion capabilities, and a crowd-powered framework that extracts relationships between the robot's motion parameters and the desired semantic behavior. These relationships enable mixed-initiative exploration of possible robot motions. We specifically demonstrate our system in the context of designing emotionally expressive behaviors. A user-study finds the system to be useful for more quickly developing desirable robot behaviors, compared to manual parameter editing.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{10.1145/3290605.3300599,
 abstract = {Expressive robots are useful in many contexts, from industrial to entertainment applications. However, designing expressive robot behaviors requires editing a large number of unintuitive control parameters. We present an interactive, data-driven system that allows editing of these complex parameters in a semantic space. Our system combines a physics-based simulation that captures the robot's motion capabilities, and a crowd-powered framework that extracts relationships between the robot's motion parameters and the desired semantic behavior. These relationships enable mixed-initiative exploration of possible robot motions. We specifically demonstrate our system in the context of designing emotionally expressive behaviors. A user-study finds the system to be useful for more quickly developing desirable robot behaviors, compared to manual parameter editing.},
 address = {New York, NY, USA},
 author = {Desai, Ruta and Anderson, Fraser and Matejka, Justin and Coros, Stelian and McCann, James and Fitzmaurice, George and Grossman, Tovi},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
 doi = {10.1145/3290605.3300599},
 isbn = {9781450359702},
 keywords = {expressive robots, semantic editing, robots, semantic design},
 location = {Glasgow, Scotland Uk},
 numpages = {14},
 pages = {1–14},
 publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
 series = {CHI '19},
 title = {Geppetto: Enabling Semantic Design of Expressive Robot Behaviors},
 url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300599},
 year = {2019}
}