This Far, No Further: Introducing Virtual Borders to Mobile Robots Using a Laser Pointer

TL;DR

This paper introduces an intuitive laser pointer-based method for defining virtual borders to control a mobile robot's workspace, enhancing human-robot interaction in shared environments.

Contribution

It presents a novel, user-friendly approach for non-experts to specify virtual borders using a laser pointer, extending existing frameworks to include flexible border shapes.

Findings

High accuracy in border definition

Linear teaching time relative to border length

Effective use by non-expert users

Abstract

We address the problem of controlling the workspace of a 3-DoF mobile robot. In a human-robot shared space, robots should navigate in a human-acceptable way according to the users' demands. For this purpose, we employ virtual borders, that are non-physical borders, to allow a user the restriction of the robot's workspace. To this end, we propose an interaction method based on a laser pointer to intuitively define virtual borders. This interaction method uses a previously developed framework based on robot guidance to change the robot's navigational behavior. Furthermore, we extend this framework to increase the flexibility by considering different types of virtual borders, i.e. polygons and curves separating an area. We evaluated our method with 15 non-expert users concerning correctness, accuracy and teaching time. The experimental results revealed a high accuracy and linear teaching time with respect to the border length while correctly incorporating the borders into the robot's navigational map. Finally, our user study showed that non-expert users can employ our interaction method.