Enhancing Non-Expert User Interaction with Robots: An Advanced Interface for Error Handling

Abstract

A key aspect of robotic systems include the ability to recover from an error and re-planning motion accordingly. The widespread acceptance of robotics in various sectors of society is inhibited by the degree of expertise required to program even the simplest error recovery strategies. Previous studies have addressed the complexity of robotics programming through user-interfaces, though they were not intended for novices or did not address error handling. This study discusses a framework developed that acts as an Interactive Robot Monitor and Control System (IRMCS), that allows non-expert users to interface, understand and recover from errors in a robotic process. The framework takes the form of a system that is geared towards informing a user of a robotic process through the means of an activity diagram that allows for visual and intuitive human-robot interaction to support incremental learning and error handling of simple pick and place tasks. To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, we conducted a control experiment with four novice users. The results revealed that by using the developed system, novices were able to recover from errors and were unsuccessful in the control condition. Furthermore, their subjective evaluation showed that these non-expert users are highly receptive to understanding and successfully implementing error recovery strategies in robotics.