iRobot | apowers@irobot.com
As the robotics field grows and becomes competitive, robotics companies are beginning to inject user-centered design methods into their processes. Applying HRI methods to industrial and commercial products introduces new challenges and a focus on cheap, proven methods. The specialty of human-robot interaction (HRI) is a growing group of roboticists, social scientists, and designers, but the field of industrial practitioners is still small. Robotics has yet to reach the transition point that Don Norman talks about in The Invisible Computer, where the level of performance exceeds users’ needs [ 1]. For that reason, the robotics industry to this point has focused on technology rather than user experience. As we see robots become ubiquitous consumer products, that focus is starting to change.
At iRobot we have one practitioner of HRI (that’s me). iRobot has begun the transition from a technology-centered company to a user-centered company, as we grow from research robots toward commercial products. As we focus more on product development, we transform many research methods from the HCI and HRI fields into practice. Additionally, robotics companies provide a good opportunity to put HCI principles into practice.
Because robotics companies like iRobot are growing quickly and shifting toward commercial products, the field is too new to have an ingrained process. HRI can become the framework for development of commercial robots.
Ethnography is the most popular investigative method being adopted in commercial HRI. Detailed ethnography studies helped iRobot learn about the culture of the PackBot users in the military and about the homes and cleaning patterns of Roomba owners. The open-ended approach of ethnography allows a series of short studies to explore varied topics and build a baseline of knowledge. Interacting with a humanlike robot is, in some ways, like the intersection of a new culture into an old one, making ethnography an excellent method of research and evaluation. For example, you may have seen a Roomba push an empty trash can around the room or catch computer cables as it vacuumed. Environment and context can be crucial factors in the success of a robot, and the ethnographic method is effective at discovering their influence.
Certainly, we run experiments in industrial HRI, but running formal experimentation is rare. It is much more common
that we need quick, effective, “discount” techniques because projects or decisions are often on a tight deadline. Just as “ discount” techniques have garnered widespread commercial use in the usability domain, they are needed in HRI as well.
To understand what principles of HCI will have the most impact in HRI, iRobot ran a series of systematic evaluations of several of iRobot’s teleoperated robots, which are driven by remote control. iRobot has several teleoperated robots, such as the PackBot, the R-Gator, and the recently announced ConnectR. To study teleoperation, we collected many hours of observations and documented more than 700 one-line “stories” from the observations. For example, users commented that powering the robot through remote control was difficult because their vision was limited. The video stream that users use to drive the robot had a low frame rate and lagged by less than a second. We’re using these stories to identify issues and prototype new ideas. By watching the videos, we noticed that when a team is working with a robot, they would often point where they were going to before they would drive there. So we prototyped a laser-pointer robot— operators use the laser pointer to put a dot on the ground in front
[ 1] Norman, D. The Invisible Computer, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press , 1998.
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