The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project can dramatically transform the population of people to whom automation, and its well-documented benefits, is available. The lack of tools targeted at truly nontechnical users that still have the aspiration to be practically useful (rather than educational in nature) is a barrier to many. The approach taken in this proposal could reduce or remove this barrier and bring simple, moving machines into many more environments. For hobbyists, this means increased ability to self-design the logical behavior of the machines and simple devices already being created in this group. For small to medium sized businesses, this may mean increased productivity, quality, and revenue, particularly for small-batch processes. Further into the future, this technology can be applied to home automation where it is critical for society that all users have control over the behavior of their connected devices, particularly in such a personal space where social and cultural considerations require individual customization to design how the "smart" things around the home move. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project has two main objectives. First, the computational scalability of an initial, proof-of concept prototype will be tested. Technical hurdles for this objective include the development of a scalable code architecture and support for a larger number of so-called sensing and action primitives, which will be explained in the proposal. Second, the ability of an untrained user to move from a contextualized use-case to specific logic design will be determined. Technical hurdles for this objective are in the domain of human factors, where a relatively complex process must be distilled to essential steps that an untrained user can relate to a familiar process in a particular environment.
