AURORA: A Platform for Advanced User-Driven Robotics Online Research and Assessment

AURORAis a software platform, that facilitates scalable deployment of robotic simulations over the web for the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) community. As robotics is becoming increasingly important in various disciplines, there is a growing need for accessible and scalable research methods. Traditional experiments often require expensive hardware and in-person participation, limiting accessibility and participant diversity. Our platform allows researchers from different fields to easily provide HRI experiences by deploying online studies with robotic simulations paired with customizable surveys, allowing end users worldwide to interact with these simulations. Our platform is entirely open source and can be hosted locally, providing flexibility and control of the research environment. Since AURORA is implemented with Docker, it is platform-independent. By offering a user-friendly interface that can be deployed and used without extensive technical expertise, our platform reduces costs, increases participant diversity, and improves the reproducibility of research in the HRI community.