Interface Matters: Comparing First and Third-Person Perspective Interfaces for Bi-Manual Robot Behavioural Cloning

Despite the growing interest in Behavioural Cloning for robots, few existing research has explicitly explored the impact of user interfaces on the effectiveness of expert demonstrations. We investigate the importance of user interface design in Behavioural Cloning, highlighting the critical role that interfaces play in conveying human demonstrations and robotics capabilities. This study compares the effectiveness of first and third-person perspective interfaces for robot shoe-lacing, a highly dexterous, bi-manual manipulation task that involves deformable objects and requires high precision. Our study highlights the importance of considering the impact of interface design on expert demonstration quality in Behavioural Cloning applications. By providing a first-person perspective, we observed significant differences in demonstration execution time and consistency compared to the third-person perspective. These findings suggest that the choice of interface can influence the quality of expert demonstrations, which in turn affects the performance of learning algorithms.