Design and Validation of Two-Handed Multi-Touch Tabletop Controllers for Robot Teleoperation

Overview

This paper describes a virtual controller for a multi-touch surface. They then compare this remote control to a physical controller in an experiment that was conducted on a made up replication of a disaster area where they had to locate victims. Finally, the results are explored and presented.

DREAM Controller

The DREAM controller is a multi-hand controller that is similar to a video game controller, but is wrapped around flat on a screen. The controller automatically appears and follows a hand that is placed on the surface. The biggest drawback of this controller versus a physical controller is that there is no immediate feedback. A user would have to memorize the controller and learn that the button was pressed without physically feeling it in their hands as is such with a physical controller. If a user pushes the ‘A’ button on a physical controller with their eyes closes, it is evident. And, with a virtual controller on a surface, it is not evident; the user must trust that the system got the command.

Experiment

There is no mention of making the “training” of using the joystick and DREAM controller. It may be true that the experimenters favored “training” the subjects with the DREAM controller over the physical controller. Since the experimenters are from UMass and the DREAM controller was designed there, they may unknowingly put more emphasis on training people to use the DREAM controller versus the physical controller. A safety net should have been set (it may have been but not mentioned in the paper) that put an equal amount of training and enthusiasm on each of these two methods. With the results being fairly statistically insignificant and this unknown, the experiment & results are a bit skeptical to me.

Results

The experiment was a bit sceptical. There was a very weak significance in the user response (travelling further, finding more victims) to the advantages of using the virtual remote.

Another interesting result was that they were able to travel so far that they lapped around and found the same victim more than once.

Discussion

• Bias in training operators to use physical controller versus using the DREAM controller
• The operators may have seen some favoring in the DREAM controller training versus the physical controller that the experiment conductors did unknowingly.
• The statistical significance was very small: this may show that there is not much of a difference between the two.
• It would be interesting to see an experiment comparing the DREAM controller to an actual controller that is similar to the controller from a Playstation or XBox.