Course Description:
This core undergraduate course covers the fundamentals of how robots can be evaluated by human users to better understand the success of robotic systems. Topics include qualitative/quantitative approaches along with objective/subjective metrics to evaluate robots, design of experiments, selection of sample, etc. By the end of this class, students will be knowledgable on the types of metrics, studies, and analyses they can conduct to understand the performance of a robot system informed by human feedback.
Learning Objectives:
  • Evaluate Human-Robot Interaction Systems.
  • Learn to work in teams.
  • Critique studies in user Human-Robot Interaction.
  • Select the appropriate study method for a human-robot interaction study.
  • Recognize differences between formative and summative studies.
  • Reflect on the difference between system metrics and user metrics (when metrics collide).
  • Create a research plan to evaluate robot systems
  • Compare and contrast method in user studies
  • Understand the connection between theory, design, implementation, and evaluation of a robot system
Group Project:
The group project is a hands-on research project whose research topic and protocol are defined by the students and culminates in a written report and an oral group presentation. Students are expected to choose from the below puzzle piece to create a research study. Students submit a 5-6 page report and give an oral presentation covering their project at the end of the term.

Labs

Lab 1 Lab 1: Basics of Human-Robot Interaction

The goal of this lab is to create an interaction using the given robotic arm embodiment and explore the role of human integration in robot task execution.

Lab 2 Lab 2: Emotive Capabilities using a Robotic Interface

The goal of this lab is to communicate an emotion using only an RC car by creating an emotive routine to understand aspects of expressive robotic behavior.

Lab 3 Lab 3: Group dynamics with a Robot

The goal of this lab is to understand the nuances present in group dynamics and how a robot may influence them through a role-play activity.

Lab 4 Lab 4: Conversational Robotic Gaze

The goal of this lab is to evaluate implemented conversational gaze behaviors in a robot and explore how the differences in human perception.

Lab 5 Lab 5: LLMs in Robotics

The goal of this lab is to analyze the pros and cons of LLMs when used in robotics and test their limitations.

Lab 6 Lab 6: Algorithm performance versus user experience

The goal of this lab is to understand the trade-offs between the user perception of robot performance and algorithmic optimal performance.

Class Lecture Summary