1 Up Close and Personal from Mars

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Copyright 2003, ACM. Interdisciplinary design teams can rapidly improve user interfaces for autonomous robots that aim to achieve educational objectives by using informal techniques and nurturing a healthy collaborative environment. The PER project required collaboration among designers who are experts in robotic autonomy, intelligent systems, software, education, usability, user interface and interaction design, industrial design, and exhibit and communication design. In addition to being a really cool project, the Personal Exploration Rover (PER) case study demonstrates that nurturing a healthy interdisciplinary design environment is essential for designing complex systems with educational goals and critical business requirements. Keywords Robot autonomy, rover, user interface, spatial manipulation, affective design, empathetic design, interdisciplinary design, rapid design, user interface, iterative design. Industry/category Education, science education, robotics, spac