Teaching People How to Teach Robots: The Effect of Instructional Materials and Dialog Design

Allowing end-users to harness the full capability of general purpose robots, requires giving them powerful tools. As the functionality of these tools increase, learning how to use them becomes more challenging. In this paper we investigate the use of instructional materials to support the learnability of a Programming by Demonstration tool. We develop a system that allows users to program complex manipulation skills on a two-armed robot through a spoken dialog interface and by physically moving the robot's arms. We present a user study (N=30) in which participants are left alone with the robot and a user manual, without any prior instructions on how to program the robot. Instead, they are asked to figure it out on their own. We investigate the effect of providing users with an additional written tutorial or an instructional video. We find that videos are most effective in training the user; however, this effect might be superficial and ultimately trial-and-error plays an important role in learning to program the robot. We also find that tutorials can be problematic when the interaction has uncertainty due to speech recognition errors. Overall, the user study demonstrates the effectiveness and learnability of the our system, while providing useful feedback about the dialog design.