Choreobot: A Reference Framework and Online Visual Dashboard for Supporting the Design of Intelligible Robotic Systems

Abstract

As robots are equipped with software that makes them increasingly autonomous, it becomes harder for humans to understand and control these robots. Human users should be able to understand and, to a certain amount, predict what the robot will do. The software that drives a robotic system is often very complex, hard to understand for human users, and there is only limited support for ensuring robotic systems are also intelligible. Adding intelligibility to the behavior of a robotic system improves the predictability, trust, safety, usability, and acceptance of such autonomous robotic systems. Applying intelligibility to the interface design can be challenging for developers and designers of robotic systems, as they are expert users in robot programming but not necessarily experts on interaction design. We propose Choreobot, an interactive, online, and visual dashboard to use with our reference framework to help identify where and when adding intelligibility to the interface design is required, desired, or optional. The reference framework and accompanying input cards allow developers and designers of robotic systems to specify a usage scenario as a set of actions and, for each action, capture the context data that is indispensable for revealing when feedforward is required. The Choreobot interactive dashboard generates a visualization that presents this data on a timeline for the sequence of actions that make up the usage scenario. A set of heuristics and rules are included that highlight where and when feedforward is desired. Based on these insights, the developers and designers can adjust the interactions to improve the interaction for the human users working with the robotic system.