"What Does it Do?": HRI Studies with the General Public

This paper introduces a methodology for human-robot interaction (HRI) experiments that involves soliciting the general public for participation. In particular, it reviews a series of HRI usability experiments with visitors to the Saint Louis Science Center and the Museum of Idaho´s annual Science and Engineering Expo between the years 2003 and 2006. During these events visitors to the museums evaluated the usability of various levels of robot autonomy, teamed with fellow humans to evaluate distributing control of an individual robot, and provided data for a comparative analysis of a variety of data representation schemes.