Encouraged by some capabilities of new mobile devices, specifically the accelerometer of the iPhone/iPod Touch, I have been working recently on developing some intuitive Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) interfaces. Using the accelerometer of an iPod Touch, and as part of my job as a research associate at the centre for innovation and technology exploitation (CITE), I have developed an intuitive interface to drive GazeBot.
The following video shows a demonstration of the system and how the robot responds to the movements of the iPod Touch:
| Controlling GazeBot with an iPod Touch |
One appealing application of the TeleGaze interface is using PDAs to drive mobile robots. The TeleGaze interface suits this purpose due to the fact that it requires only one input device, which is inputs from the human operator in the native TeleGaze. Another advantage of TeleGaze is the use of transparent regions to position the action regions, which saves space and suits the screen size of mobile devices. Therefore, I have modified a version of the TeleGaze interface to run on a PDA in order to drive a mobile robot from a remote location.
The following video demonstrates the modifications and functionalities of the interface running on a PDA device:
| Mobile Robot Navigation with PDA |