Comparing usability of user interfaces for robotic telepresence

In the last years, robotic telepresence solutions have received a significant attention from both the commercial and academic worlds, due to their ability to allow people to feel physically present at a remote place and move in it. Operating a mobile robot with some autonomous capabilities from distance can enable a wide range of mass-market applications, encompassing teleconferencing, virtual tourism, etc. In these scenarios, the possibility to interact with the robot in a natural way becomes of crucial importance. The aim of this paper is to investigate, through a comparative analysis, the usability of two major approaches used today for controlling telepresence robots, i.e., keyboard and point-and-click video navigation. A control system featuring the above interfaces plus a combination of the two has been developed, and applied to the operation of a prototype telepresence robot in an office scenario. The system additionally includes functionalities found in many research and industry solutions, like map-based localization and “augmented” navigation. Then, a user study has been performed to assess the usability of the various control modalities for the execution of some navigation tasks in the considered context. The study provided precious indications to be possibly exploited for guiding next developments in the field.