Style by demonstration for interactive robot motion

Abstract

As robots continue to enter people's everyday spaces, we argue that it will be increasingly important to consider the robots' movement style as an integral component of their interaction design. That is, aspects of the robot's movement which are not directly related to a task at hand (e.g., pick up a ball) can have a strong impact on how people perceive that action (e.g., aggressively or hesitantly). We call these elements the movement style. We believe that perceptions of this kind of style will be highly dependent on the culture, group, or individual, and so people will need to have the ability to customize their robot. Therefore, in this work we use Style by Demonstration, a style focus on the more-traditional programming by demonstration technique, and present the Puppet Dancer system, an interface for constructing paired and interactive robotic dances. In this paper we detail the Puppet Dancer interface and interaction design, explain our new algorithms for teaching dance by demonstration, and present the results from a formal qualitative study.