Development of Touch Based Interaction Mechanisms for the Hurt Project Development of Touch Based Interaction Mechanisms for the Hurt Project

Objective: To develop an interface optimized for touch and multi-touch input for the mobile control of robot teams. Background: Currently, the Human Robot Teaming (HuRT) project uses an interface that was not initially designed to support touch-based interaction. This interface design makes touch input difficult to implement and use. Method: A new interface was designed to incorporate general multi-touch functionality (such as gestures for zooming and panning a map), as well as touch interactions that are more specific to the HuRT project. Ten people completed a within subjects user evaluation. The dependent variables assessed were task completion time, overall scenario completion time, workload, and subjective feedback from user surveys. Results: The post-completion scenario surveys and interface comparison surveys demonstrate that the new interface is significantly preferred and requires a lower workload. An analysis of the automatically logged experiment data shows that the new interface is significantly faster to use as whole for path and area entry. Also, that data suggests that less overall errors are made in the new interface. Conclusion: The new interface is preferred and demonstrates superior performance compared to the current interface.