ARTHUR: Authoring Human-Robot Collaboration Processes with Augmented Reality using Hybrid User Interfaces

TL;DR

ARTHUR is an open-source tool that simplifies creating augmented reality interfaces for human-robot collaboration, integrating multi-modal feedback, user controls, and customizable conditions to enhance interaction design.

Contribution

It introduces ARTHUR, a novel hybrid user interface system combining desktop, touchscreen, and head-mounted displays for authoring and testing AR-supported human-robot collaboration.

Findings

ARTHUR effectively supports diverse feedback and control types.

Participants found the hybrid interface useful for collaboration tasks.

Replicated scenarios demonstrate ARTHUR's applicability across contexts.

Abstract

While augmented reality shows promise for supporting human-robot collaboration, creating such interactive systems still poses great challenges. Addressing this, we introduce ARTHUR, an open-source authoring tool for augmented reality-supported human-robot collaboration. ARTHUR supports 20 types of multi-modal feedback to convey robot, task, and system state, 10 actions that enable the user to control the robot and system, and 18 conditions for feedback customization and triggering of actions. By combining these elements, users can create interaction spaces, controls, and information visualizations in augmented reality for collaboration with robot arms. With ARTHUR, we propose to combine desktop interfaces and touchscreen devices for effective authoring, with head-mounted displays for testing and in-situ refinements. To demonstrate the general applicability of ARTHUR for human-robot collaboration scenarios, we replicate representative examples from prior work. Further, in an evaluation with five participants, we reflect on the usefulness of our hybrid user interface approach and the provided functionality, highlighting directions for future work.