Pose and paste — An intuitive interface for remote navigation of a multi-robot system

We present Pose and Paste (P&P) - an intuitive interface designed to facilitate interaction between a single user and a number of robots equipped with cameras. With this interface, a user wearing a head-mounted display is able to cycle through the real-time video streams originating from the robots´ cameras. The user is also able to select a robot and remotely position it by simply walking or turning his/her head, i.e., control the robot´s motion in a master/slave-type fashion. We report the results of an initial hardware experiment where a user located in the USA is tasked to position two quadrotor robots within a motion capture laboratory located in Germany. These results suggest that P&P is a feasible approach to remotely inspect disaster affected sites. Lastly, we conduct a user study to compare P&P with a baseline interface composed of a traditional computer monitor and a video game controller. The quantitative results and qualitative discussions resulting from this user study highlight how such multi-robot interfaces can be further improved.