Interactive robots in human environments have the potential to change our daily lives by providing education, eldercare, entertainment services, and more. However, creating new applications and behaviors for such robots is complex for many reasons, including the challenges of prototyping and testing. This thesis presents our research on designing and evaluating an information-gathering application for a mobile robot in a university venue and exploring the use of robots for gathering customer feedback in the hospitality industry. Our goal is to enable non-experts, such as salespeople and designers, to create and explore new robot applications without requiring additional technical expertise. To that end, we share our experiences of iteratively adapting a robot programming system for creating socially interactive robots in commercial spaces. Based on these experiences, we identified the ability to \textit{express concurrency} and \textit{modify low-level behaviors with ease }as two important requirements for interactive robot programming systems. We categorize common concurrency patterns and present a framework for identifying programming constructs required to express concurrency; we then implemented and investigated three representative concurrency interfaces for a block-based visual robot programming system and assessed them with a systematic evaluation and a user study. To modify low-level behaviors, we present an iterative robot program repair approach that enables programmers or the robot's users to easily change program details that govern a robot's low-level behaviors to improve interaction quality; we evaluated our approach with both simulation and human experiments. Throughout the document, we discuss our findings, results, insights, and the limitations of our approaches. We conclude the thesis by envisioning directions for future work.
Talk video: https://youtu.be/pTml6yEIjcw
Talk narrative: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14xNVnrfuxXqaBYvQ9KOEsc8S7fl9ScsQ1XLLBJiKlgU
Thesis paper: https://mjyc.github.io/assets/pdfs/PhD%20Thesis%20-%20Michael%20Jae-Yoon%20Chung.pdf