Visual programming environments for end-user development of intelligent and social robots: a systematic review

Robots are becoming interactive and robust enough to be adopted outside laboratories and in industrial scenarios as well as interacting with humans in social activities. However, the design of engaging robotbased applications requires the availability of usable, flexible and accessible development frameworks, which can be adopted and mastered by researchers and practitioners in social sciences and adult end users as a whole. This paper surveys Visual Programming Environments aimed at enabling a paradigm fostering the so-called End-User Development of applications involving robots with social capabilities. The focus of this article is on those Visual Programming Environments that are designed to support social research goals as well as to cater for professional needs of people not trained in more traditional text-based computer programming languages. This survey excludes interfaces aimed at supporting expert programmers, at allowing industrial robots to perform typical industrial tasks (such as pick and place operations), and at teaching children how to code. After having performed a systematic search, sixteen programming environments have been included in this survey. Our goal is two-fold: first, to present these software tools with their technical features and Authoring Artificial Intelligence modeling approaches, and second, to present open challenges in the development of Visual Programming Environments for end users and social researchers, which can be informative and valuable to the community. The results show that the most recent such tools are adopting distributed and Component-Based Software Engineering approaches and web technologies. However, few of them have been designed to enable the independence of end users from high-tech scribes. Moreover, findings indicate the need for (i) more objective and comparative evaluations, as well as usability and user experience studies with real end users; and (ii) validations of these tools for designing applications aimed at working “in-the-wild” rather than only in laboratories and structured settings.