  We introduce the SEAN Experimental Platform (SEAN-EP), an open-source system
that allows roboticists to gather human feedback for social robot navigation at
scale using online interactive simulations. Through SEAN-EP, remote users can
control the motion of a human avatar via their web browser and interact with a
virtual robot controlled through the Robot Operating System. Heavy computation
in SEAN-EP is delegated to cloud servers such that users do not need
specialized hardware to take part in the simulations. We validated SEAN-EP and
its usability through an online survey, and compared the data collected from
this survey with a similar video survey. Our results suggest that human
perceptions of robots may differ based on whether they interact with the robots
in simulation or observe them in videos. Also, our study suggests that people
may perceive the surveys with interactive simulations as less mentally
demanding than video surveys.
