Geppetto: Enabling Semantic Design of Expressive Robot Behaviors - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

Geppetto: Enabling Semantic Design of Expressive Robot Behaviors

Ruta Desai, Fraser Anderson, Justin Matejka, Stelian Coros, James McCann, George W. Fitzmaurice, and Tovi Grossman
Conference Paper, Proceedings of CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19), May, 2019

Abstract

Expressive robots are useful in many contexts, from industrial to entertainment applications. However, designing expressive robot behaviors requires editing a large number of unintuitive control parameters. We present an interactive, data-driven system that allows editing of these complex parameters in a semantic space. Our system combines a physics-based simulation that captures the robot's motion capabilities, and a crowd-powered framework that extracts relationships between the robot's motion parameters and the desired semantic behavior. These relationships enable mixed-initiative exploration of possible robot motions. We specifically demonstrate our system in the context of designing emotionally expressive behaviors. A user-study finds the system to be useful for more quickly developing desirable robot behaviors, compared to manual parameter editing.

BibTeX

@conference{Desai-2019-113388,
author = {Ruta Desai and Fraser Anderson and Justin Matejka and Stelian Coros and James McCann and George W. Fitzmaurice and Tovi Grossman},
title = {Geppetto: Enabling Semantic Design of Expressive Robot Behaviors},
booktitle = {Proceedings of CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19)},
year = {2019},
month = {May},
}