Style-by-Demonstration: Using Broomsticks and Tangibles to Show Robots How to Follow People

Robots are poised to enter our everyday environments such as our homes and offices. These contexts present unique human demands, including questions of the style and personality of the robot's actions. Style-oriented characteristics are difficult to define programmatically, and as such, are often out of reach from the designers involved in creating robotic technologies. This problem is particularly prominent for a robot's interactive behaviors, those that must react accordingly to dynamic environments and actions of people. In this paper, we present the concept of programming robotic style by demonstration through the use of broomsticks and tangibles, such that non-technical designers can directly create the style of actions using their existing skill sets. We developed a working system as a proof-of-concept, and present two novel interfaces for directly demonstrating the style of motions to robots. Our current focus is on the style of a robot following a person, but we envision that simple physical interfaces like ours can be used by non-technical people to design the style of a wide range of robotic behaviors.