Robots are becoming interactive and robust enough to be adopted outside laboratories and in industrial scenarios as well as interacting with humans in social activities. However, the design of engaging robot-based applications requires the availability of usable, flexible and accessible development frameworks, which can be adopted and mastered by researchers and practitioners in social sciences and adult end users as a whole. This paper surveys Visual Programming Environments aimed at enabling a paradigm fostering the so-called End-User Development of applications involving robots with social capabilities. The focus of this article is on those Visual Programming Environments that are designed to support social research goals as well as to cater for professional needs of people not trained in more traditional text-based computer programming languages. This survey excludes interfaces aimed at supporting expert programmers, at allowing industrial robots to perform typical industrial tasks (such as pick and place operations), and at teaching children how to code. After having performed a systematic search, sixteen programming environments have been included in this survey. Our goal is two-fold: first, to present these software tools with their technical features and Authoring Artificial Intelligence modeling approaches, and second, to present open challenges in the development of Visual Programming Environments for end users and social researchers, which can be informative and valuable to the community. The results show that the most recent such tools are adopting distributed and Component-Based Software Engineering approaches and web technologies. However, few of them have been designed to enable the independence of end users from high-tech scribes. Moreover, findings indicate the need for (i) more objective and comparative evaluations, as well as usability and user experience studies with real end users; and (ii) validations of these tools for designing applications aimed at working “in-the-wild” rather than only in laboratories and structured settings.

机器人已经变得足够具有交互性和鲁棒性，可以在实验室之外和工业场景中采用，并且可以在社交活动中与人互动。但是，吸引人的基于机器人的应用程序的设计需要可用性，灵活和可访问的开发框架的可用性，社会科学的研究人员和从业人员以及整个成年人最终用户都可以采用和掌握这些框架。本文调查了旨在实现范例的视觉编程环境，该范例促进了涉及具有社交功能的机器人的应用程序的所谓最终用户开发。本文的重点是那些可视化编程环境这些工具旨在支持社会研究目标，并满足未接受过更传统的基于文本的计算机编程语言培训的人们的专业需求。该调查不包括旨在支持专家程序员，允许工业机器人执行典型的工业任务（例如拾取和放置操作）以及教孩子如何编码的接口。执行了系统的搜索后，此调查中包含了十六种编程环境。我们的目标有两个：首先，介绍这些软件工具的技术特征和编写人工智能建模方法，其次，提出可视化编程环境开发中的开放性挑战面向最终用户和社会研究人员，这对于社区而言可以是有益的并且有价值的。结果表明，最新的此类工具正在采用分布式和基于组件的软件工程方法以及Web技术。但是，它们中很少有旨在使最终用户脱离高科技抄写员的人。此外，调查结果表明需要（i）进行更客观和比较的评估，以及对实际最终用户的可用性和用户体验研究；（ii）对这些工具的验证，这些工具用于设计旨在“在野外”工作而不是仅在实验室和结构化环境中工作的应用程序。