Multi-Touch Interaction for Robot Control (IUI-2009)

Multi-Touch Interaction for Robot Control (IUI-2009)

By: Mark Micire, Jill Drury, Brenden Keyes, Holly Yanco

Summary:
This paper discussed how robot interaction is highly limited when using conventional items such as joysticks, buttons and sliders. They suggested a multi-touch interaction sequence that would allow for a better array of possible actions and better control for robots. Their screen had many visual aids that allowed better control of a robot and then did a user study on how people would use them. The researchers discovered that there are three main components that are important when talking about screen interaction: gesture magnitude, gesture alignment and gesture sequence. Some of the users seemed to think that the magnitude of their gestures was significant (closer for slower, further away for faster etc.). This concept is called proportional velocity. The second component, gesture alignment describes how users gestures interacted with respect to the x and y axis. Whether or not the users usually went left and then right of if they moved diagonally off the main axis. The third component had to deal with gesture sequence, or the pattern of primitive actions (defined as touch, drag and hold). There were several emergent behaviors that came out of this study. These emergent behaviors are things that were not thought of as an initial action sequence when using the product, but that users experimenting with the system came up with. Even though each user was trained in the same way they interacted with the robot in their own way. The researchers plan to do more research on interaction placement on the screen (localizing commonly used controls) and the effects of fatigue on user interaction.

Discussion:
I thought this paper was an interesting topic, but not really as innovative as some of the other papers or as well written. Multi-touch is a very popular topic of research and for good reason. I think that with all of the multi-touch research there will be many advances in this area over the next several years.