TouchMe: An Augmented Reality Interface for Remote Robot Control

Abstract

General remote-control robots are manipulated by joysticks or game pads. These are difficult for inexperienced users, however, because the relationship between user input and the resulting robot movement may not be intuitive, e.g., tilting the joystick to the right to rotate the robot left. To solve this problem, we propose a touch-based interface called TouchMe for controlling a robot remotely from a third-person point of view. This interface allows the user to directly manipulate individual parts of a robot by touching it as seen by a camera. Our system provides intuitive operation allowing the user to use it with minimal training. In this paper, we describe TouchMe interaction and prototype implementation. We also introduce three types of movement for controlling the robot in response to user interaction and report on results of an empirical comparison of these methods.