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Programming industrial robots is difficult and expensive. Although recent work has made substantial progress in making it accessible to a wider range of users, it is often limited to simple programs and its usability remains untested in practice. In this article, we introduce Duplo, a block-based programming environment that allows end-users to program two-armed robots and solve tasks that require coordination. Duplo positions the program for each arm side-by-side, using the spatial relationship between blocks from each program to represent parallelism in a way that end-users can easily understand. This design was proposed by previous work, but not implemented or evaluated in a realistic programming setting. We performed a randomized experiment with 52 participants that evaluated Duplo on a complex programming task that contained several sub-tasks. We compared Duplo with RobotStudio Online YuMi, a commercial solution, and found that Duplo allowed participants to solve the same task faster and with greater success. By analyzing the information collected during our user study, we further identified factors that explain this performance difference, as well as remaining barriers, such as debugging issues and difficulties in interacting with the robot. This work represents another step towards allowing a wider audience of non-professionals to program, which might enable the broader deployment of robotics.
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Enabling end-users to implement larger block-based programs
Block-based programming, already popular in computer science education, has been successfully used to make programming accessible to end-users in applied domains such as the field of robotics. Most prior work in these domains has examined smaller programs that are usually simple and fit a single screen. However, real block-based programs often grow larger and, because end-users are unlikely to break them down into separate functions, they often become unwieldy. In our study, we introduce a function-centric block-based environment to help end-users write programs that require a large number of blocks. Through a user study with 92 users, we evaluated our approach and found that while users could successfully complete smaller tasks with and without our approach, they were both quicker and more successful with our function-centric method when tackling larger tasks. This work demonstrates that adding scaffolding can encourage the systematic use of functions, enabling end-users to write larger programs with block-based programming environments, which can contribute to the solution of more complex tasks in applied domains.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2024561
- PAR ID:
- 10566302
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9781450392235
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 347 to 349
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Pittsburgh Pennsylvania
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3510454.3528644
