Abstract
This paper presents the first study evaluating methods in remote teleoperation of multi-robot furniture for realistic applications. In a within-subjects user study (N = 12), we tested two robot control methods designed to work at different levels of abstraction in a custom web-based user interface (UI): clicking and dragging to indicate a desired position and orientation for a single ChairBot (“set goal”), and selecting from a list of preset arrangements for multiple ChairBots (“select arrangement”). Participants were asked to use this UI to rearrange ChairBots in a living room across three birthday-themed arrangement prompts. We found overlapping preferences for how distinct participants set of the room for particular party phases, and received high experience and usability ratings for the novel web-based multi-ChairBot controller design. Self-reported survey responses suggest that our design is easy to learn and usable. Our works provides insight to future controls design for and research on multi-robot furniture systems.
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Notes
- 1.
Code and build instructions available at www.github.com/stoddabr/ros_flask.
- 2.
Adjusted cumulative score: SUS = 1.11 * [(odd questions − 1) + (10 − even questions)].
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Stoddard, B., Giolando, MR., Knight, H. (2021). Teleoperating Multi-robot Furniture. In: Li, H., et al. Social Robotics. ICSR 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13086. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90525-5_45
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