Tools for programming human robot interaction

Whilst robots are increasingly being used in scenarios that involve human-robot interaction, it is still difficult to program them to interact with humans. This is because current programming tools either require programmers to work at low abstraction levels or they lack features needed to implement particular aspects of human-robot interaction. Our goal is to create an API that is both capable of programming a wide range of human-robot interaction scenarios and is easy to use by the various users of human-robot interaction programming tools. We have taken a first step toward this API by developing an exemplar, high level API for programming social interaction and evaluating it with the Cognitive Dimensions framework. We plan to explore other aspects of human-robot interaction, including navigation and manipulation and exploring how they should be integrated with our existing primitives for programming social interaction.