%documentclass{buthesis} %Gives author-year citation style \documentclass[numbib, twoadv]{buthesis} %Gives numerical citation style %\documentclass[twoadv}{buthesis} %Allows entry of second advisor %\usepackage{graphics} %Select graphics package \usepackage{graphicx} % \usepackage{pdfpages} %For including PDF pages in appendices %\usepackage{amsthm} %Add other packages as necessary \usepackage{array} %Extended column types and \arraybackslash \usepackage{makecell} %Multi-line table header cells \usepackage{tabularx} %Auto-width table columns \usepackage{tikz} %For programmatic diagrams \usetikzlibrary{shapes,arrows,positioning,fit,backgrounds,decorations.pathreplacing} \usepackage[ hidelinks, linktoc=all, pdfpagemode=UseOutlines ]{hyperref} %Enable hyperlinks and PDF bookmarks \hyphenation{HRIStudio} \begin{document} \butitle{A Web-Based Wizard-of-Oz Platform for Collaborative and Reproducible Human-Robot Interaction Research} \author{Sean O'Connor} \degree{Bachelor of Science} \department{Computer Science} \advisor{L. Felipe Perrone} \advisorb{Brian King} \chair{Alan Marchiori} \maketitle \frontmatter \acknowledgments{ (Draft Acknowledgments) } \tableofcontents \listoftables \listoffigures \abstract{ The Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) technique is widely used in Human-Robot Interaction research to prototype and evaluate robot interaction designs before autonomous capabilities are fully developed. However, two persistent problems limit the technique's effectiveness. First, existing WoZ tools impose technical barriers that prevent domain experts outside engineering from conducting independent studies --- the Accessibility Problem. Second, the fragmented landscape of custom, robot-specific tools makes it difficult to run the same social interaction script on a different robot platform without rebuilding the implementation from scratch --- the Reproducibility Problem, as the term is used in this thesis. Note that reproducibility here concerns execution consistency within a study and the portability of interaction scripts across robot platforms; it does not refer to independent replication of a published study by third-party researchers. Through a thorough literature review, I identified a set of design principles to guide the development of WoZ support tools: a hierarchical specification model that organizes experiments as studies, experiments, steps, and actions; an event-driven execution model that separates protocol design from live trial control; and a plugin architecture that decouples experiment logic from robot-specific implementations. I implemented HRIStudio, an open-source, web-based platform that follows these design principles, providing a visual experiment designer, a guided wizard execution interface, automated timestamped logging with explicit deviation tracking, and role-based access control for research teams. I then evaluated HRIStudio in a pilot between-subjects study comparing it against Choregraphe, the standard NAO programming tool, using six participants who each designed and executed an interactive storytelling task on a NAO robot. The pilot study confirms the thesis: HRIStudio wizards achieved higher design fidelity, higher execution reliability, and higher perceived usability than Choregraphe wizards across all six sessions. The only unprompted specification deviation in the dataset occurred in the Choregraphe condition, illustrating the execution-consistency failure mode that HRIStudio's enforcement model is designed to prevent. 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. } \mainmatter \include{chapters/01_introduction} \include{chapters/02_background} \include{chapters/03_reproducibility} \include{chapters/04_system_design} \include{chapters/05_implementation} \include{chapters/06_evaluation} \include{chapters/07_results} \include{chapters/08_discussion} \include{chapters/09_conclusion} \backmatter %\bibliographystyle{thesis_num} %This uses BU thesis file thesis_num.bst %\bibliographystyle{abbrvnat} \bibliographystyle{unsrtnat} %\bibliographystyle{plainnat} %%%%Use following line if bibtex is being used. \bibliography{refs.bib} %%%Use following if references are being entered by hand. %\begin{thebibliography}{99} %\bibitem[Smith(2005)]{SMI05}J.~Smith, ``An even better paper,'' %J.~Better Phys., {\bf 2}, 294 (2005). %\bibitem[Ligare(2004)]{LIG04}M.~Ligare, ``A very good paper,'' %J.~Good Phys., {\bf 2}, 294 (2004). %\end{thebibliography} \makeatletter\@mainmattertrue\makeatother \appendix \include{chapters/app_blank_templates} \include{chapters/app_materials} \include{chapters/app_tech_docs} \end{document}