Mobile robot control using a small display

This paper addresses the problem of controlling a mobile robot using a small, portable user interface. In some applications, including security and military, a user might command a mobile robot in the field using a wearable computer. The wearable computer may have a small display that would make information delivery difficult. Also, full video feedback from the robot may not be available due to radio bandwidth limitations. One solution is to have the user interact with a virtual model of the robot environment (available from other sources). We designed an interface to interact with such a model, using a small display. The user controls the robot by gesturing with a single hand. The gestures are sensed using an instrumented glove and a 6 DOF (degree of freedom) magnetic tracker mounted on the user's hand. The interface was tested using two different tasks: a 6 DOF manipulation task and a visualization task which was primarily 3 DOF. For comparison, a simple, 2 DOF input device was also implemented. It was found that the 6 DOF input device was clearly superior for the manipulation task, but results were inconclusive for the visualization task.