New paradigms for human-robot interaction using tangible user interfaces

As technology advances, more and more robots are expected to integrate into our everyday life. However, due to current limitation, we can not communicate with robots directly using languages, gestures and facial expressions. Some type of interfaces is still needed to assist the robots to understand human commands or vice versa. Robots are digitally controlled physical entities that exist in both the virtual realm and the physical world. They are capable of interpreting bits and bytes and converting them into physical outputs to interact with their surroundings. Thus, we believe that an interface that emphasizes physical interaction (physical input mapped to physical output) may be more intuitive to understand and use than the traditional interfaces when interacting with robots.;In this thesis, we propose the use of tangible user interfaces (TUIs) in human robot interaction (HRI) and demonstrate two TUIs that we have created for interacting with a single robot and a team of robots. The first TUI utilizes generic TUIs for controlling the locomotion and posture of an AIBO(TM) robot dog. The second TUI uses plush toys and allows a single user to interact with multiple robots at the same time. A usability evaluation is conducted for each of these TUIs in comparison with a reference interface that we designed. We believe that one of these baseline systems, a touch-based interface for a team of robots, is a contribution in itself, beyond its value for the TUI comparative study. The consensus from the studies has indicated that TUIs are generally easier to learn, more enjoyable and efficient to use in completing certain HRI tasks.