Style by Demonstration: Using Broomsticks and Tangibles to Show Robots How to Follow People

The style in which a robot moves, including its gait or locomotion style, can project strong messages, for example, it can be easy to distinguish a happy dog from an aggressive dog simply by how it is moving, and one can often tell if a colleague is stressed simply by the way they are walking. Defining the real-time interactive, stylistic aspects of robotic movements via programming can be difficult and time consuming. Instead, we propose to enable people to use their existing teaching skills to directly demonstrate to robots the desired style of robot movements; in this paper we present an initial style-bydemonstration (SBD) proof-of-concept that focuses on teaching a robot specific, interactive locomotion styles. We present a novel broomstick-robot interface for directly demonstrating locomotion style to a robot, and a design critique by experienced programmers that compares the designing of interactive, stylistic robotic locomotion by our Style-By-Demonstration (SBD) approach with traditional programming methods.