Is Augmented Reality the Future Middleware for Improving Human Robot Interactions: A Case Study

With robots appearing frequently within our society, the cases will be higher where people with little or no practical experience in robotics would have to supervise robots. Future interfaces should make Human Robot Interactions (HRI) intuitive for such less-experienced users. A key requirement to have an intuitive interface is to improve the level of HRI performance. In this study we try to improve the HRI performance by developing a system namely, SHRIMP (Spatial Human Robot Interaction Marker Platform) based on Augmented Reality (AR) technology. We present SHRIMP as a new type of middleware for HRI, that can mediate high-level user intentions with robotrelated action tasks. SHRIMP enables users to embed user intentions in the form of AR diagrams inside the robot’s environment (as seen by the robot’s camera view). These AR diagrams translate into action tasks for robots to follow in that environment. Furthermore, we report on the HRI performance induced by our SHRIMP framework when compared to an alternative more common robot control interface, a joystick controller.