Gestural and Touchscreen Interaction for Human-Robot Collaboration: a Comparative Study

TL;DR

This study compares gestural and touchscreen interaction modalities for human-robot collaboration, evaluating user experience to identify effective communication tools in industrial human-robot interaction scenarios.

Contribution

The paper introduces a modular architecture for multimodal human-robot interaction and provides a comparative analysis of gestural versus touchscreen inputs.

Findings

Touchscreen interaction offers more precise control.

Gestural interaction provides more natural communication.

User preferences vary depending on task complexity.

Abstract

Close human-robot interaction (HRI), especially in industrial scenarios, has been vastly investigated for the advantages of combining human and robot skills. For an effective HRI, the validity of currently available human-machine communication media or tools should be questioned, and new communication modalities should be explored. This article proposes a modular architecture allowing human operators to interact with robots through different modalities. In particular, we implemented the architecture to handle gestural and touchscreen input, respectively, using a smartwatch and a tablet. Finally, we performed a comparative user experience study between these two modalities.