  With the expected adoption of robots able to seamlessly and intuitively
interact with people in real-world scenarios, the need arises to provide
non-technically-skilled users with easy-to-understand paradigms for customising
robot behaviors. In this paper, we present an interaction design robot
programming platform for enabling multidisciplinary social robot research and
applications. This platform is referred to Node Primitives (NEP) and consists
of two main parts. On the one hand, a ZeroMQ and Python-based distributed
software framework has been developed to provide inter-process communication
and robot behavior specification mechanisms. On the other hand, a web-based
end-user programming (EUP) interface has been developed to allow for an easy
and intuitive way of programming and executing robot behaviors. In order to
evaluate NEP, we discuss the development of a human-robot interaction
application using arm gestures to control robot behaviors. A usability test for
the proposed EUP interface is also presented.
