User-Friendly Smartphone Interface to Share Knowledge in Human-Robot Collaborative Search Tasks

Abstract

Long-distance human-robot collaborative tasks require robust forms of knowledge-sharing among agents in order to optimize the performance of the task. In this paper, we propose to take advantage of the proliferation of mobile phones to use them as a reliable low-cost communication interface, as opposed to the use of specific gadgets or speech and gesture recognition techniques that are highly prone to failure in the presence of noise or occlusions. Our interface is focused on search tasks, and it allows the user to share with the other agents real-time information such as their position, their intention or even what they would like the other agents to do. To test its acceptability, a user study was conducted with 20 volunteers in a human-human scenario. A second round of experiments with other 30 volunteers was conducted to test different ways to encourage user interaction with our interface. Finally, real-life experiments were also conducted with a robot to apply skills learned to the desired scenario. We found a statistically significant improvement in the amount of information exchanged between agents.

Shared Task Representation for Human–Robot Collaborative Navigation: The Collaborative Search Case

“…To enable the usage of the SRS model in human-robot communication, we designed a mobile application [39]. It has allowed us to share knowledge and task representations through a user-friendly HRI graphical interface.…”

Perception-Intention-Action Cycle as a Human Acceptable Way for Improving Human-Robot Collaborative Tasks

“…Speaking of intention, [16,17,24,26] are examples of trying to infer it using different mathematical models.They blame the uncertainty in their experiments on the fact that their models are not perfect yet, when interacting with the human or simply allowing them to indicate their intention explicitly would simplify the problem. This second approach is rarely addressed in the literature but in user interfaces [7]. Specifically applied to physical HRI, [23] makes a review of measuring intent and its interpretation by the robot to establish a shared-control policy, which is named as role allocation.…”

Integrating ROS and Android for Rescuers in a Cloud Robotics Architecture: Application to a Casualty Evacuation Exercise

“…Furthermore, smartphone apps can provide effective teleoperation human interfaces for robots running on ROS [16]. In fact, a user-friendly smartphone human-robot interaction interface can improve mission performance and responder acceptability in long-distance collaborative search [17]. The ROS-Mobile Android application [18] is an alternative to RViz for mobile devices, offering control and visualization features.…”