Changing shape: improving situation awareness for a polymorphic robot

Polymorphic, or shape-shifting, robots can normally tackle more types of tasks than non-polymorphic robots due to their flexible morphology. Their versatility adds to the challenge of designing a human interface, however. To investigate the utility of providing awareness information about the robot’s physical configuration (or “pose”), we performed a withinsubjects experiment with presence or absence of pose information being the independent variable. We found that participants were more likely to tip the robot or have it ride up on obstacles when they used the display that lacked pose information and also more likely to move the robot to the highest position to become oriented. There was no significant difference in the number of times that participants bumped into obstacles, however, indicating that having more awareness of the robot’s state does not affect awareness of the robots’ immediate surroundings. Participants thought the display with pose information was easier to...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: HRI
• Authors: Jill L. Drury, Holly A. Yanco, Whitney Howell, Brian Minten, Jennifer Casper
• Keywords: HRI 2006, Human Robot Interaction, Pose Information, Robot, Robot’s Physical Configuration