Will People Enjoy a Robot Trainer? A Case Study with Snoopie the Pacerbot
Maximilian Du, Jennifer Grannen, Shuran Song, Dorsa Sadigh
TLDR
A robot quadruped trainer, SNOOPIE, significantly improves runner adherence and enjoyment compared to wearable devices.
Key contributions
- Introduces SNOOPIE, an autonomous robot quadruped designed as a personal pacer for interval training.
- Compares SNOOPIE to a wearable (Apple Watch), showing 60.6% better pace adherence.
- Demonstrates 45.9% more consistent running speeds with the robot trainer.
- Users strongly preferred SNOOPIE for ease of use, enjoyability, and helpfulness over wearables.
Why it matters
This paper shows that embodied robots can be superior to wearables for exercise training, improving both performance and user experience. It highlights the potential for physical robots to enhance human-robot interaction in fitness. This could lead to more engaging and effective personal training solutions.
Original Abstract
The physicality of exercise makes the role of athletic trainers unique. Their physical presence allows them to guide a student through a motion, demonstrate an exercise, and give intuitive feedback. Robot quadrupeds are also embodied agents with robust agility and athleticism. In our work, we investigate whether a robot quadruped can serve as an effective and enjoyable personal trainer device. We focus on a case study of interval training for runners: a repetitive, long-horizon task where precision and consistency are important. To meet this challenge, we propose SNOOPIE, an autonomous robot quadruped pacer capable of running interval training exercises tailored to challenge a user's personal abilities. We conduct a set of user experiments that compare the robot trainer to a wearable trainer device--the Apple Watch--to investigate the benefits of a physical embodiment in exercise-based interactions. We demonstrate 60.6% better adherence to a pace schedule and were 45.9% more consistent across their running speeds with the quadruped trainer. Subjective results also showed that participants strongly preferred training with the robot over wearable devices across many qualitative axes, including its ease of use (+56.7%), enjoyability of the interaction (+60.6%), and helpfulness (+39.1%). Additional videos and visualizations can be found on our website: https://sites.google.com/view/snoopie
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