Human-robot interaction design using Interaction Composer eight years of lessons learned

Abstract

Interaction Composer, a visual programming environment designed to enable programmers and non-programmers to collaboratively design social human-robot interactions in the form of state-based flows, has been in use at our laboratory for eight years. The system architecture and the design principles behind the framework have been presented in other work, but in this paper we take a case-study approach, examining several actual examples of the use of this toolkit over an eight-year period. We examine the structure and content of interaction flows, identify common design patterns, and discuss elements of the framework which have proven valuable, features which did not solve their intended purposes, and ways that future systems might better address these issues. It is hoped that the insights gained from this study will contribute to the development of more effective and more usable tools and frameworks for interaction design.