Lead me by the hand: evaluation of a direct physical interface for nursing assistant robots

—When a user is in close proximity to a robot, physical contact becomes a potentially valuable channel for communication. People often use direct physical contact to guide a person to a desired location (e.g., leading a child by the hand) or to adjust a person’s posture for a task (e.g., a dance instructor working with a dancer). Within this paper, we present an implementation and evaluation of a direct physical interface for a human-scale anthropomorphic robot. We define a direct physical interface (DPI) to be an interface that enables a user to influence a robot’s behavior by making contact with its body. Human-human interaction inspired our interface design, which enables a user to lead our robot by the hand and position its arms. We evaluated this interface in the context of assisting nurses with patient lifting, which we expect to be a high-impact application area. Our evaluation consisted of a controlled laboratory experiment with 18 nurses from the Atlanta area of Georgi...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: HRI
• Authors: Tiffany L. Chen, Charles C. Kemp
• Keywords: Direct Physical Contact, Direct Physical Interface, HRI 2010, Human Robot Interaction, Physical Contact