PLATYPUS: An Environment for End-User Development of Robot-Assisted Physical Training

Abstract

When robots are used for physical therapy, programming becomes too important to be left to programmers. Developing programs for training robots is time-consuming and requires expertise within multiple engineering domains, combined with physical training, therapy, and human interaction competencies. In this paper, we present Platypus: an end-user development environment that encompasses the design and execution of custom activities for robotassisted physical training. The current version ships a set of plugins for Eclipse's IDE and uses a block-based visual language to specify the robot's behaviors at a high abstraction level, which are translated into the low-level code specifications followed by the robot. As a use case, we present its implementation on RoboTrainer, a modular, rope-based pulling device for training at home. While user tests suggest that the platform has the potential to reduce the technical obstacles for building custom training scenarios, informational and design learning barriers were revealed during the tests.