Evaluating the Usability of Robot Programming Toolsets

Abstract

The days of specifying missions for mobile robots using traditional programming languages such as C++ and LISP are coming to an end. The need to support operators lacking programming skills coupled with the increasing diversity of robot run-time operating systems is moving the field toward high-level robot programming toolsets that allow graphical mission specification. This paper ex plores the issues of evaluating such toolsets as to their usability. We first examine how usability criteria are established and perfor mance target values are chosen. The methods by which suitable experiments are created to gather data relevant to the usability criteria are then presented. Finally, methods to analyze the data gathered to establish values for the usability criteria are discussed. The MissionLab toolset is used as a concrete example throughout the article to ground the discussions, but the methods and techniques are generalizable to many such systems.