What to Expect When You're Expecting Robots by Laura Major

Author:Laura Major [Major, Laura and Shah, Julie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2020-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 17: An example of a robot persona for a partially autonomous drone that would be used for indoor industrial inspection. This description of the role of the robot will help the entire engineering team remember the key design points.

To facilitate the initial design of the robot’s behavior, as part of this process we develop a robot persona. We know that people personify the robots they interact with; therefore, we must explicitly design robot personas to set the vision and design the robot to calibrate our human expectations. User personas are developed to help a design team empathize with a user population. Robot personas can provide a vision for the design team for the other half of the human-robot partnership equation. This persona will enable the roboticist to keep the human-robot partnership at the forefront as the robot software is developed.

The design team should use the Situation Awareness–based Agent Transparency model and the three requirements for interdependence (observability, predictability, and directability) to design the robot persona and model the robot’s tasks. All of this sets the stage for an effective robot-centered design effort that results in an effective human-robot partnership.

Decide, Prototype, and Test: The previous two steps lay the foundation for the iterative design and test cycle. Here, classic UI prototyping and testing methods need to be expanded to prioritize robot-human interdependencies. The various options for robot behavior stem from that overall framework of interdependence. And these design approaches must be tested across a wider range of scenarios than is typical in today’s design processes. These scenarios need to include failures, or extreme environmental situations such as accidents. Some of these accidents may be caused by outside entities. The goal is to maintain optimal human-robot interdependence in these critical moments. In times of stress or anomalies, the human’s trust in the robot may flag, just as in human-human relationships. Interdependencies may be put to the test. Therefore, it is at these moments when it must be clear to the human what the robot is able to do and how it will do it, and what the human must do to bring about the best result.

There is a rich array of UX and human factors approaches for designers to draw from at this stage. Below we summarize two categories of the methods currently being used across consumer products and industrial systems.

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