Considerations for End-User Development in the Caregiving Domain

As service robots become more capable of autonomous behaviors, it becomes increasingly important to consider how people will be able to communicate with a robot about what task it should perform and how to do the task. There has been a rise in attention to end-user development (EUD), where researchers create interfaces that enable non-roboticist end users to script tasks for autonomous robots to perform. Currently, state-of-the-art interfaces are largely constrained, often through simplified domains or restrictive end-user interaction. Motivated by our past qualitative design work exploring how to integrate a care robot in an assisted living community, we discuss challenges of EUD in this complex domain. One set of challenges stems from different user-facing representations, e.g., certain tasks may lend themselves better to a rule-based trigger-action representations, whereas other tasks may be easier to specify via a sequence of actions. The other stems from considering the needs of multiple stakeholders, e.g., caregivers and residents of the facility may all create tasks for the robot, but the robot may not be able to share information about all tasks with all residents due to privacy concerns. We present scenarios that illustrate these challenges and also discuss possible solutions.

随着服务机器人具备更强的自主行为能力，考虑人们如何能够就机器人应执行什么任务以及如何执行任务与机器人进行交流变得日益重要。终端用户开发（EUD）受到越来越多的关注，研究人员创建了一些界面，使非机器人专家的终端用户能够为自主机器人编写任务脚本。目前，最先进的界面在很大程度上受到限制，通常是通过简化的领域或受限的终端用户交互来实现的。基于我们过去探索如何在辅助生活社区中集成护理机器人的定性设计工作，我们讨论了在这个复杂领域中终端用户开发面临的挑战。一组挑战源于不同的面向用户的表示形式，例如，某些任务可能更适合基于规则的触发 - 动作表示形式，而其他任务可能通过一系列动作更容易指定。另一组挑战源于考虑多个利益相关者的需求，例如，护理人员和设施的居民可能都会为机器人创建任务，但由于隐私问题，机器人可能无法与所有居民共享所有任务的信息。我们提出了一些场景来说明这些挑战，并讨论了可能的解决方案。