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

作者：Chen Tiffany L^*; Kemp Charles C

来源：Advanced Robotics, 2011, 25(5): 605-627.

DOI：10.1163/016918611X558243

• Healthcare robotics nursing
• direct physical interface
• human-robot interaction
• user study

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 robotic assistance may be useful and provide design recommendations specifically in the area of healthcare. This paper is based on 'Lead me by the hand: evaluation of a direct physical interface for nursing assistant robots', by Tiffany L. Chen and Charles C. Kemp, which appeared in the Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction.

• 出版日期2011