Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is a rapidly expanding field of study that focuses on allowing non-roboticist users to naturally and effectively interact with robots. The importance of conducting extensive user studies has become a fundamental component of HRI research; however, due to the nature of robotics research, such studies often become expensive, time consuming, and limited to constrained demographics. This work presents the Robot Management System, a novel framework for bringing robotic experiments to the web. A detailed description of the open source system, an outline of new security measures, and a use case study of the RMS as a means of conducting user studies is presented. Using a series of navigation and manipulation tasks with a PR2 robot, three user study conditions are compared: users that are co-present with the robot, users that are recruited to the university lab but control the robot from a different room, and remote web-based users. The findings show little statistical differences between usability patterns across these groups, further supporting the use of web-based crowdsourcing techniques for certain types of HRI evaluations.

Creator

• Toris, Russell C

Contributors

• Chernova, Sonia

Degree

• MS

Unit

• Computer Science

Publisher

• Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Language

• English

Identifier

• etd-100813-143754

Keyword

• HRI
• crowdsourcing
• Robotics

Advisor

• Chernova, Sonia

Defense date

• 2013-10-08

Year

• 2013

Date created

• 2013-10-08

Resource type

• Thesis

Rights statement

• In Copyright