Teaching Robots Style: Designing and Evaluating Style-by-Demonstration for Interactive Robotic Locomotion

In this paper we present a multi-part formal design and evaluation of the style-by-demonstration (SBD) approach to creating interactive robot behaviors: enabling people to design the style of interactive robot behaviors by providing an exemplar. We first introduce our Puppet Master SBD algorithm that enables the creation of interactive robot behaviors with a focus on style: users provide an example demonstration of human-robot interaction and Puppet Master uses this to generate real-time interactive robot output that matches the demonstrated style. We further designed and implemented original interfaces for demonstrating interactive robot style and for interacting with the resulting robot behaviors. Following, we detail a set of studies we performed to appraise users’ reactions to and acceptance of the SBD interaction design approach, the effectiveness of the underlying Puppet Master algorithm, and the usability of the demonstration interfaces. Fundamentally, this paper investigates the broad questions of how people respond to SBD interaction, how they engage SBD interfaces, how SBD can be practically realized, and how the SBD approach to social human-robot interaction can be employed in future interaction design.