An Interaction Design Framework for Social Robots

We present a novel design framework enabling the development of social robotics applications by cross-disciplinary teams of programmers and interaction designers. By combining a modular back-end software architecture with an easy-to-use graphical interface for developing interaction sequences, this system enables programmers and designers to work in parallel to develop robot applications and tune the subtle details of social behaviors. In this paper, we describe the structure of our design framework, and we present an experimental evaluation of our system showing that it increases the effectiveness of programmer-designer teams developing social robot applications.