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Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is a rapidly expanding field of study that focuses on allowing nonroboticist users to naturally and effectively interact with robots. The importance of conducting extensive user studies has become a fundamental component of HRI research; however, due to the nature of robotics research, such studies often become expensive, time consuming, and limited to constrained demographics. In this work, we present the Robot Management System (RMS), a novel framework for bringing robotic experiments to the web. We present a detailed description of our open-source system and describe an initial trial of the RMS as a means of conducting user studies. Using a series of navigation and manipulation tasks with a PR2 robot, we compare three user study conditions: users that are co-present with the robot, users that are recruited to the university laboratory but control the robot from a different room, and remote web-based users. Our findings show little statistical differences between usability patterns across these groups, validating the use of web-based crowdsourcing techniques for certain types of HRI evaluations.

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In order for robots to be useful in real world learning scenarios, non-expert human teachers must be able to interact with and teach robots in an intuitive manner. One essential robot capability is wide-area (mobile or nonstationary) pick-and-place tasks. Even in its simplest form, pick-and-place is a hard problem due to uncertainty arising from noisy input demonstrations and non-deterministic real world environments. This work introduces a novel method for goal-based learning from demonstration where we learn over a large corpus of human demonstrated ground truths of placement locations in an unsupervised manner via Gaussian Mixture Models. The goal is to provide a multi-hypothesis solution for a given task description which can later be utilized in the execution of the task itself. In addition to learning the actual arrangements of the items in question, we also autonomously extract which frames of reference are important in each demonstration. We further verify these findings in a subsequent evaluation and execution via a mobile manipulator.