A Direct Physical Interface for Navigation and Positioning of a Robotic Nursing Assistant

People often use direct physical contact to guide a person to a desired location (e.g., leading a child by the hand) or to adjust a person’s posture for a task (e.g., a dance instructor working with a dancer). When a user is in close proximity to a robot, physical contact becomes a potentially valuable channel for communication. We define a direct physical interface (DPI) as an interface that enables a user to influence a robot’s behavior by making contact with its body. We evaluated a DPI in a controlled laboratory setting with 18 nurses and compared its performance with that of a comparable gamepad interface. The DPI significantly outperformed the gamepad according to several objective and subjective measures. Nurses also tended to exert more force at the robot’s end-effectors and command higher velocities when using the DPI to perform a navigation task compared with using the DPI to perform a positioning task. Based on user surveys, we identify various nursing tasks where ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: AR
• Authors: Tiffany L. Chen, Charles C. Kemp
• Keywords: AR 2011, Direct Physical Interface, Mathematics, Physical Contact, Robots