Human demonstrations are important in a range of robotics applications, and are created with a variety of input methods. However, the design space for these input methods has not been extensively studied. In this paper, focusing on demonstrations of hand-scale object manipulation tasks to robot arms with two-finger grippers, we identify distinct usage paradigms in robotics that utilize human-to-robot demonstrations, extract abstract features that form a design space for input methods, and characterize existing input methods as well as a novel input method that we introduce, the instrumented tongs. We detail the design specifications for our method and present a user study that compares it against three common input methods: free-hand manipulation, kinesthetic guidance, and teleoperation. Study results show that instrumented tongs provide high quality demonstrations and a positive experience for the demonstrator while offering good correspondence to the target robot.

@InProceedings{PSMG19,
  author       = "Praveena, Pragathi and Subramani, Guru and Mutlu, Bilge and Gleicher, Michael",
  title        = "Characterizing Input Methods for Human-to-robot Demonstrations",
  booktitle    = "2019 14th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)",
  pages        = "344--353",
  month        = "March",
  year         = "2019",
  publisher    = "IEEE",
  doi          = "10.1109/HRI.2019.8673310",
  url          = "http://graphics.cs.wisc.edu/Papers/2019/PSMG19"
}