Performance of Multi-Touch Table Interaction and Physically Situated Robot Agents

Recent developments in multi-touch technologies have exposed fertile ground for research in enriched human-robot interaction. Although the technologies have been used for virtual 3D applications, to the authors’ knowledge, ours is the first study to explore the use of a multi-touch table with a physical robot agent. This baseline study explores the control of a single agent with a multi-touch table using an adapted, previously studied, joystick-based interface. The field test shows that multi-touch interaction does not in any way impair the performance of the user in a navigation and search task. In fact, our results show an increase in learnability over the original design using joystick and keyboardbased control mechanisms. Further, we analyzed users’ interaction styles with the multi-touch interface in detail to isolate mismatches between user expectations and interaction functionality.