CAPIRCI: A Multi-modal System for Collaborative Robot Programming

This paper presents CAPIRCI (Chat And Program Industrial Robots through Convenient Interaction), a multi-modal web application supporting end users, with no expertise in computer science, to define and modify tasks to be executed by collaborative robots. The application provides two interaction modalities, the former based on a chat interface, the latter presenting a visual programming language inspired to block-based solutions but tailored to the domain at hand. In order to investigate how different kinds of users may accept and use CAPIRCI, a user study with 20 participants has been carried out. Participants were equally split in expert programmers and non-expert programmers; execution times do not show any significant differences between the two groups, while qualitative data collected through direct observation and interviews provide useful hints and suggestions for system refinement.