Planning: Toward OpenHMI, A Community-Designed Infrastructure for Human-Machine Interaction Research

人机交互是科学家研究用户如何与机器人和其他设备一起工作的研究领域。它是一个广泛的、交叉的计算领域，在支持来自不同背景和不同需求的人的健康、教育和培训方面具有巨大的潜力。这一领域的技术正在迅速发展，并利用了包括计算机视觉和计算机智能在内的主要发展领域。然而，由于缺乏工具和软件平台，这一研究领域受到了阻碍，这些工具和软件平台是可访问的、负担得起的，并且适合在可复制的真实世界研究中与现实世界用户一起使用。这个规划项目旨在用一年的时间来了解这一研究领域的社区需求，以设计所谓的“OpenHMI：，一个开源的、负担得起的、模块化的平台，用于在人机交互(HMI)中实现可扩展和可访问的研究和扩展”。OpenHMI旨在通过支持负担得起的和包容性的真实世界研究和数据收集来扩大对研究的参与。通过建立一个可获得的低成本和社区可获得的平台，这一基础设施将扩大来自各种机构和研究支助水平的研究人员的参与，特别是向资源不足的研究人员和群体敞开大门。通过让社区中的研究人员参与设计过程，这项工作建立了一个生态系统，旨在消除传统上代表不足、资源不足和/或服务于少数群体和机构的研究人员进入的障碍，从而扩大计算研究想法和项目。OpenHMI硬件的低成本还可以使其成为一个负担得起的平台，用于向K-12演示入门计算、计算机编码、机器人学和设计主题，并实现安全的动手学习。这个为期一年的规划项目使用调查、访谈和研讨会来收集有关开发OpenHMI的计算社区需求的信息。具体地说，三项全国范围的调查评估了社区的详细需求，包括所需的硬件和软件基础设施以及每种基础设施的具体优先功能。利用这些投入，开发了硬件和软件的模型、早期原型和模拟，并在两个旨在广泛访问和包容的全国范围内的虚拟研讨会中使用。研讨会旨在通过实践体验活动对参与者进行培训，同时收集有关可用性、优先级和偏好的信息。收集的大量社区数据为OpenHMI的设计提供了信息，使其能够向社区提供信息，并确保其通过开源、可访问、模块化和可扩展的方式显著推进人机交互研究的研究，并促进将该研究领域包容、安全、以隐私为中心和有效地整合到用户的日常生活中，以更好地支持符合伦理的数据驱动的研究。社区设计过程还建立了一个开放和协作的生态系统，以加速从小规模短期实验室环境中的研究研究过渡到现实环境中的大规模长期部署。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Human-machine interaction is an area of research where scientist study how users work together with robots and other devices. It is a broad, cross-cutting area of computing with great potential for supporting wellness, education, and training of people from various backgrounds and with diverse needs. The technology in this field is expanding rapidly, and leverages major areas of development, including computer vision and computer intelligence. However, this area of research is stifled by the lack of tools and software platforms that are accessible, affordable, and appropriate for use with real-world users in replicable real-world research studies. This planning project aims to spend a year understanding this field of research community needs toward designing, what is called “OpenHMI:, an open-source, affordable and modular platform for enabling scalable and accessible research and outreach in human-machine interaction (HMI)”. OpenHMI aims to broaden participation in research by enabling affordable and inclusive real-world studies and data collections. By creating an accessible low-cost and a community accessible platform, this infrastructure will broaden participation of researchers from a range of institutions and levels of research support, in particular opening doors to under-resourced researchers and groups. By involving researchers in the community in the design process, this work establishes an ecosystem that aims to remove barriers to entry for researchers from traditionally under-represented, under-resourced, and/or minority-serving groups and institutions, thereby expanding computing research ideas and projects. The low cost of OpenHMI hardware can also make it an affordable platform for demonstrating introductory computing, computer coding, robotics, and design topics to K-12 and enabling safe hands-on learning.This one-year planning project uses surveys, interviews, and workshops to collect information about the computing community needs toward developing OpenHMI. Specifically, three nation-wide surveys assess detailed needs of the community, including hardware and software infrastructure needed and specific prioritized features of each. Using that input, mockups, early prototypes, and simulations of hardware and software are developed and used in two nation-wide virtual workshops designed to be broadly accessible and inclusive. The workshops serve to train the participants with hands-on experiential activities while collecting information about usability, priorities, and preferences. The large corpus of collected community data informs the design of OpenHMI so that it can be community-informed and designed to ensure its ability to significantly advance research in human machine interaction research by being open-source, accessible, modular and scalable and to facilitate inclusive, safe, privacy-centered and effective integration of this field of research into everyday lives of users to better support ethical data-driven research. The community design process also establishes an open and collaborative ecosystem to accelerate the transition from research studies in small-scale short-term laboratory settings to large-scale long-term deployments in real-world environments.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.