Towards Optimal Human-Robot Interface Design Applied to Underwater Robotics Teleoperation

Paulo Padrao, Jose Fuentes, Tero Kaarlela, Alfredo Bayuelo, Leonardo Bobadilla

Abstract: Efficient and intuitive Human-Robot interfaces are crucial for expanding the user base of operators and enabling new applications in critical areas such as precision agriculture, automated construction, rehabilitation, and environmental monitoring. In this paper, we investigate the design of intuitive human-robot interfaces for the teleoperation of dynamical systems. The proposed framework seeks an optimal interface that complies with key concepts such as user comfort, efficiency, continuity, and consistency. Moreover, we show that optimal interfaces arising from common robot tasks are user-friendly and ensure a certain degree of naturalness within our framework. As a proof-of-concept, we introduce an approach to teleoperating underwater vehicles, allowing the translation between human body movements into vehicle control commands. Field experiments were conducted utilizing a custom head-mounted display coupled with a smartphone to interpret body movements and transmit corresponding commands to operate a remotely operated vehicle. These experiments were performed in a marine robotics research testbed to validate the efficacy and practicality of our proposed interface design.