A Pilot Study on Teleoperated Mobile Robots in Home Environments

Mobile robots operating in home environments must deal with constrained space and a great variety of obstacles and situations to handle. This article presents a pilot study aiming at identifying design specifications of a new user interface and robot specifications to improve efficiency and security for novice teleoperators of a mobile robot used in home environments. This pilot study is part of the familiarization phase of an iterative interdisciplinary design process aiming at outlining critical design and experimental issues before engaging into detailed design processes, elaborated experimental methodology and rigorous testing of the various capabilities of mobile robots for home care applications. We evaluated, with a small set of trained and untrained operators, two conceptually different user interfaces for teleoperated mobile robotic systems. These results demonstrate the challenges and the necessity of conducting trials in home environments to evaluate such teleoperated systems, and outline distinct preferences regarding robot capabilities, user interface navigation method and evaluation methodology