Design patterns for exploring and prototyping human-robot interactions

Robotic products are envisioned to offer rich interactions in a range of environments. While their specific roles will vary across applications, these products will draw on fundamental building blocks of interaction, such as greeting people, narrating information, providing instructions, and asking and answering questions. In this paper, we explore how such building blocks might serve as interaction design patterns that enable design exploration and prototyping for human-robot interaction. To construct a pattern library, we observed human interactions across different scenarios and identified seven patterns, such as question-answer pairs. We then designed and implemented Interaction Blocks, a visual authoring environment that enabled prototyping of robot interactions using these patterns. Design sessions with designers and developers demonstrated the promise of using a pattern language for designing robot interactions, confirmed the usability of our authoring environment, and provided insights into future research on tools for human-robot interaction design.