Date of Thesis

Spring 2026

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Description

The Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) technique is widely used in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research, but two persistent problems limit its effectiveness: existing tools impose technical barriers that exclude non-engineering domain experts (the Accessibility Problem), and the fragmented landscape of robot-specific implementations makes interaction scripts difficult to port across platforms (the Reproducibility Problem- concerning execution consistency and portability, not third-party replication). Through a literature review, I identified three design principles to address both: a hierarchical specification model, an event-driven execution model, and a plugin architecture that decouples experiment logic from robot-specific implementations. I realized these principles in HRIStudio, an open-source, web-based platform providing a visual experiment designer, a guided wizard execution interface, automated timestamped logging with deviation tracking, and role-based access control. I evaluated HRIStudio in a pilot between-subjects study (N=6) against Choregraphe, the standard programming tool for the NAO robot. HRIStudio wizards achieved higher design fidelity, execution reliability, and perceived usability across all six sessions; the only unprompted specification deviation in the dataset occurred in the Choregraphe condition. While the pilot scale precludes inferential claims, the directional evidence across all measures supports the position that a tool built to realize the identified design principles can have significant impact on accessibility and reproducibility in WoZ-based HRI research.

Keywords

Robotics, NAO, Humanoid Robotics, Human-Robot Interaction

Access Type

Honors Thesis

Degree Type

Bachelor of Science

Major

Computer Science & Engineering

First Advisor

L. Felipe Perrone

Second Advisor

Brian King

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