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A Study on Different User Interfaces for Teaching Virtual Borders to Mobile Robots

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Abstract

Human-aware robot navigation is an essential aspect to increase the acceptance of mobile service robots in human-centered environments, e.g. home environments. Robots need to navigate in a human-acceptable way according to the users’ conventions, presence and needs. In order to address the users’ needs, we employ virtual borders, which are non-physical borders and respected by the robots while working, to effectively restrict the workspace of a mobile robot and change its navigational behavior. To this end, we consider different user interfaces, i.e. visual markers, a laser pointer, a graphical user interface and a RGB-D Google Tango tablet with augmented reality application, to allow non-expert users the flexible and interactive definition of virtual borders. These user interfaces were evaluated with respect to their correctness, flexibility, accuracy, teaching effort and user experience. Experimental results show that the RGB-D Google Tango tablet as user interface yields the best overall results compared to the other user interfaces. Apart from a low teaching effort and high flexibility and accuracy, it features the highest user ratings acquired from a comprehensive user study with 25 participants for intuitiveness, comfort, learnability and its feedback system.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all participants of the user study for their time and valuable feedback.

Funding

This study was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Grant Number 03FH006PX5).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences, Campus Minden, 32427, Minden, Germany

    Dennis Sprute & Matthias König

  2. Faculty of Computer Science, Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, 39106, Magdeburg, Germany

    Dennis Sprute & Klaus Tönnies

Authors
  1. Dennis Sprute
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  2. Klaus Tönnies
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  3. Matthias König
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Correspondence to Dennis Sprute.

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This work is financially supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF, Funding Number: 03FH006PX5).

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Sprute, D., Tönnies, K. & König, M. A Study on Different User Interfaces for Teaching Virtual Borders to Mobile Robots. Int J of Soc Robotics 11, 373–388 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-018-0506-3

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