A PDA-based high-level human-robot interaction

This paper describes an innovative architecture for a high-level interaction between a human and a robot via a personal digital assistant (PDA). A PDA is a design to provide small and lightweight mobile interaction devices. This interface architecture differs from previous PDA human-robot interfaces in that it uses high-level task decomposition, and an adaptive user interface (UI) rather than teleoperation interfaces. An adaptive user interface typically refers to a flexible interaction strategy between a human and a computer to contribute what is best-suited at the most appropriate time. We extended this concept to human-robot interaction (HRI) and employed the architecture into mobile devices (i.e. PDA and PocketPC). Such devices could provide mobility and durability for robot operations. This work implemented an agent-based high-level human-robot interface on a PDA to provide interactions with robots. Four PDA user interfaces were developed: a map-based robot control screen, a laser range finder screen, a sonar sensor screen, and a camera view with an object selection screen. The proposed framework has been implemented to develop a prototypical PDA-based human-robot interaction system. The initial results are encouraging and demonstrate the capabilities of such a human-robot framework.