Evaluating CoBlox: A Comparative Study of Robotics Programming Environments for Adult Novices

A new wave of collaborative robots designed to work alongside humans is bringing the automation historically seen in large-scale industrial settings to new, diverse contexts. However, the ability to program these machines often requires years of training, making them inaccessible or impractical for many. This paper rethinks what robot programming interfaces could be in order to make them accessible and intuitive for adult novice programmers. We created a block-based interface for programming a one-armed industrial robot and conducted a study with 67 adult novices comparing it to two programming approaches in widespread use in industry. The results show participants using the block-based interface successfully implemented robot programs faster with no loss in accuracy while reporting higher scores for usability, learnability, and overall satisfaction. The contribution of this work is showing the potential for using block-based programming to make powerful technologies accessible to a wider audience.