Improving Teleoperation Interfaces to Support Therapists in Robot-Assisted Therapy
Socially assistive robots (SARs) receive significant research attention due to their positive impact across many contexts. SARs are often teleoperated by a caregiver (therapist) who controls the robot's motion and dialogue. My research focuses on the interfaces used to control these robots and specifically looks at four main questions.
[RQ1] What Level of Autonomy is appropriate for Socially Assistive Robots?
Researchers on Level of Robot Autonomy (LoA) have provided guidelines for roboticists and robot researchers to follow when selecting their robots' LoA. We looked through papers on Socially Assistive Robots published from 2016-2021 at the HRI conference and THRI journal to understand how researchers choose their robots' LoA and to what extent that matches LoA selection guidelines. You can find our findings in our paper published at AltHRI'22.
Saad Elbeleidy, Terran Mott, and Tom Williams. 2022. Practical, Ethical, and Overlooked: Teleoperated Socially Assistive Robots in the Quest for Autonomy. In Proceedings of the 2022 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '22). IEEE Press, 577–587.
[RQ2] How are SAR systems used in robot-assisted therapy for autistic children?
Socially Assistive Robots currently used to support autistic children are often teleoperated by a therapist or caregiver. We obtained data from Fine Art Miracles, a nonprofit service organization that supports vulnerable populations, of therapists using SARs to deliver social skills programs to groups of autistic children. We identified 5 major themes of content that therapists use and several important patterns about those. You can find out more about these by reading our paper published at IDC'21.
Saad Elbeleidy, Daniel Rosen, Dan Liu, Aubrey Shick, and Tom Williams. 2021. Analyzing Teleoperation Interface Usage of Robots in Therapy for Children with Autism. In Interaction Design and Children (IDC '21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 112–118. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3459990.3460715
[RQ3] What are therapists’ needs in conducting therapy for autistic children, including when teleoperating robots?
After learning about how therapists use SARs in practice, we realized there was a lot more to learn from them directly instead of simply observing usage logs. We interviewed several experts with experience operating robots in practice to learn more about their needs in therapy, needs when using a robot, and their perspective on how they would use a particular teleoperation interface. This work is currently under review.
Learning from these interviews, we developed design prototypes and ran group usability tests with a current version of a SAR teleoperation interface, and our prototypes. We learned a lot about how new users perceive these teleoperation interfaces and what they need in order to adopt them. This work is currently under review.
[RQ4] What interface capabilities can meet therapists’ needs in operating a robot in therapy with autistic children?
Based on our need-gathering work, we are now well equipped to develop interfaces that likely meet therapists' needs in operating robots in therapy. Specifically, we found that current interfaces often function as simple robot motion or verbalization controllers without considering the important assistive context in which they are used. We plan on incorporating designs that account for therapists' documentation and evaluation needs when using robots. This work is currently ongoing.