Evaluation of a Model-driven Knowledge Storage and Retrieval IDE for Interactive HRI Systems

Efficient storage and querying of long-term human–robot interaction data requires application developers to have an in-depth understanding of the involved domains. Creating syntactically and semantically correct queries in the development process is an error prone task which can immensely impact the interaction experience of humans with robots and artificial agents. To address this issue, we present and evaluate a model-driven software development approach to create a long-term storage system to be used in highly interactive HRI scenarios. We created multiple domain-specific languages that allow us to model the domain and seamlessly embed its concepts into a query language. Along with corresponding model-to-model and model-to-text transformations, we generate a fully integrated workbench facilitating data storage and retrieval. It supports developers in the query design process and allows in-tool query execution without the need to have prior in-depth knowledge of the domain. We evaluated our work in an extensive user study and can show that the generated tool yields multiple advantages compared to the usual query design approach.