Will People Enjoy a Robot Trainer? a Case Study with Snoopie the Pacerbot
Maximilian Du, Jennifer Grannen, Shuran Song, Dorsa Sadigh
AI summary
Problem
Wearable fitness trackers lack physical embodiment, making it difficult to demonstrate exercises, provide intuitive feedback, and maintain consistent pacing for interval training.
Approach
The authors developed SNOOPIE, an autonomous quadruped robot that calibrates to a user's pace and leads them through customized fast/slow interval running sessions on a track, then compared it against wearable tech in user studies.
Key results
- 60.6% better adherence to pace schedules
- 45.9% more consistent running speeds
- Strong subjective preference for robot over wearables (+60.6% enjoyability)
- Successful 11 km multi-session deployment with a single participant
Why it matters
Demonstrates that physically embodied robots can outperform passive wearables in guiding human exercise, highlighting a promising future for robotic fitness companions.
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