Exploring Design Space in Augmented Reality for Multipurpose Daily Used Supernumerary Robotic Limbs
概要
Robotics has been applied in people’s daily life and wearable robotics is one class of the robotics. Wearable robotics allows itself to change its shape so that it could provide multiple functions in different shapes. The potential possibilities of this kind of robotics, especially in daily life tasks, have not been largely investigated. Therefore, we introduce “ARobot”, a system that is designed to help users control the robot in daily use as an interaction interface. We mainly investigate the level of usefulness and preference in differences and performance between different features through following three aspects of interaction: Physical Object Manipulation, Digital Interaction and Human-like agent interaction experience.
The system consists of following components: Augmented Reality (AR) user interface, robot itself, AR head-mount as display, trackers and AR-robot integration software. We apply our AR system to an example wearable robot and use it as our prototype. We design the user interface as a unified interface so that it can handle different kinds of tasks and provide comprehensive experience. Based on users’ needs and their selections, the system will have different modes due to current situations. The robot can be controlled to manipulate with physical objects through AR user interface based on users’ commands. Users can also manipulate the robot’s intrinsic through the AR system. They can retrieve information about the robot and make adjusts and changes to the robot’s settings to satisfy their needs. Users can also interact with the agent which is a representative of the robot and have human-being realistic interaction experience because the agent has human-like physical appearance.
We demonstrate the potential possibilities of using wearable robot which is controlled by AR system in daily life tasks in chosen design space. It shows how AR system provide more functionalities and experiences while using the robot. We evaluate our implemented system by inviting a number of participants in our user study. Based on the feedback from the evaluation, participants prefer having more choices and options in interaction interface and personal customization is also important aspect to consider. Our approach is found to be interesting and innovative. In the end, we discuss about our research’s limitations and future work’s possibilities to provide future research direction.