IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - June 2023 - 128

the technical details, they're welcome to
visit your website or read your paper.
In practice, this means that you may
want to include more background, fewer
references to prior work, a highly selective
methodology, and more emphasis on
experiments, results, and future work.
Make sure that both the end of the
video itself and the video description
are very clear about where more information
can be found. Ideally, this would
include a link to a publicly accessible
version of the paper and a link to a website
with more detail.
Personally, I always appreciate when
researchers spend a little time (15 s or
so) at the end of a video showing things
not working the way they're supposed
to. Outtakes or bloopers can be funny,
but more importantly, they're a reminder
that robotics research is hard. They
help the audience share a little bit of the
experience that the researchers had, and
they avoid the appearance that everything
was easy and worked perfectly the
first time. For viewers who may be less
experienced with robots, they also help
to demystify the field.
CONTEXT
It's critical to provide accurate context
for videos of robots. It's not always
clear (especially to nonroboticists) what
a robot may be doing or not doing on
its own, and your video should be as
explicit as possible about any assistance
that your system is getting. For example,
your video should identify:
■ If the video has been sped up or
slowed down.
■ If the video makes multiple experiments
look like one continuous
experiment.
■ If external power, compute, or localization
is being used.
■ How the robot is being controlled
(e.g., human in the loop, human
supervised, scripted actions, partial
autonomy, or full autonomy).
These things should be made explicit
on the video itself, not in the video
description or in captions. Clearly communicating
the limitations of your work
is the responsible thing to do, and not
doing this is detrimental to the robotics
community.
12 IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE JUNE 2023
8
STRUCTURE
Here are some general suggestions for
effective video structure:
■ Introduction
* Grab the viewer's attention immediately.
Don't start with a title
slide-instead, start with a short
clip of something visually interesting
happening, whether it's a real
robot, something in simulation, or
a visual metaphor. Capture the
viewer's attention by describing the
research you're doing in a relatable
way and communicating your own
excitement about your work.
■ Background
* Introduce yourself and your lab,
and provide context for the work
that you are about to share. Why
are you the one doing this work? Is
it because you've worked on similar
things in the past, because you
were inspired by others, because
you wanted to solve this particular
problem, or for some other reason?
* Is there anything that needs to be
explained so that the importance
of your work can be understood?
* How is your work related to other
research in this area?
* Why is your work important within
robotics and beyond robotics?
■ Selective methodology
* How did you decide what kind of
experiments to do, and what
exactly are these experiments telling
you and not telling you?
■ Experiments and results
* Show any experiments that you
did while explaining what is happening,
especially if the important
results are not immediately
obvious.
* Be careful about cutting together
different angles attempting to
show a single experiment. I usually
assume that multiple cuts
means multiple takes and will
interpret what I see accordingly. If
possible, show one uninterrupted
take, and then show highlights
(close-ups, etc.) afterward.
* What are the constraints on the
work that you are presenting?
* Show things that don't work as
well as things that do work, and
use failures to provide additional
context for successes.
* How will your results help other
roboticists or people using robots?
■ Future work
* What, if anything, prevents this
research from being applied in the
real world?
* How can this research be extended,
and what will you be working
on next?
WHAT IF MY RESEARCH DOESN'T
HAVE A GOOD VISUAL COMPONENT?
This can be tricky, and it is something
that I often struggle with as a journalist.
The best strategy that I have is to
find some way of using a metaphor to
connect your research with something
more visual. Think about what your
research will enable robots to do, and
even if what you're working on isn't
actually that thing, it still provides an
opportunity for you to tell a good story
about your research. As long as you can
connect your work to something that
people can identify with and care
about, you can still make an effective
and successful video, although it will
certainly take a little more effort.
HELPFUL HARDWARE
Your content is the most important part
of any video, so the goal with recording
quality should primarily be for
your footage to be decent, or at least
not distractingly bad, rather than spectacular.
Investing time or money into
something more than decent is nice but
not necessary.
With that in mind, a cell phone is probably
a totally adequate video camera most
of the time, and newer phones are even
able to record in slow motion. And since
phones are everywhere, why not use lots
of them at the same time? They're great
for multiple angles and creative perspectives.
Try putting a phone over your robot,
or under your robot, or even taping a
phone to your robot, and see what you get.
Even more important than a good
camera is having good light. You can
spend an enormous amount of money on
fancy video lights and whatnot, or you
can just be mindful of the light when
you're recording. Bright, diffuse light is
IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - June 2023

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