Camera orientation: an opportunity for human-robot collaborative control

Collaborative control systems have shown great promise in offloading tasks to an automated peer, allowing the human operators to focus their efforts on perceptual judgments and decision-making that exceed the current capability of automation. This paper initiates a discussion about exposing camera orientation to the collaborative control interaction model. It may be the case that the robot can work with the human operator to automatically direct attention to critical features in an environment by systematically influencing the orientation of the camera. The results of a user evaluation suggest that this kind of interface has potential, but there are several additional interaction constraints that will need to be considered in a successful design.