Evaluation of a tricycle-style teleoperational interface for children: A comparative experiment with a video game controller

A tricycle-style teleoperational interface for children to remotely control a robot was developed. There were two crucial requirements in its design: (1) the interface had to be intuitively controllable so that children could use it without requiring detailed instructions and (2) the control of the teleoperational system needed to be fun so that children did not get bored. In this paper, we report an experiment in which 20 children (4-8 years old) performed a range of tasks by remotely controlling a robot using two types of teleoperational interfaces: the tricycle-style interface and a standard video game controller. The results show that the children could perform the tasks better with the tricycle-style interface.