Direct Manipulation-like Tools for Designing Intelligent Virtual Agents

If intelligent virtual agents are to become widely adopted it is vital that they can be designed using the user friendly graphical tools that are used in other areas of graphics. However, extending this sort of tool to autonomous, interactive behaviour, an area with more in common with artificial intelligence, is not trivial. This paper discusses the issues involved in creating user-friendly design tools for IVAs and proposes an extension of the direct manipulation methodology to IVAs. It also presents an initial implementation of this methodology

Bringing tabletop technologies to kindergarten children

Taking computer technology away from the desktop and into a more physical, manipulative space, is known that provide many benefits and is generally considered to result in a system that is easier to learn and more natural to use. This paper describes a design solution that allows kindergarten children to take the benefits of the new pedagogical possibilities that tangible interaction and tabletop technologies offer for manipulative learning. After analysis of children's cognitive and psychomotor skills, we have designed and tuned a prototype game that is suitable for children aged 3 to 4 years old. Our prototype uniquely combines low cost tangible interaction and tabletop technology with tutored learning. The design has been based on the observation of children using the technology, letting them freely play with the application during three play sessions. These observational sessions informed the design decisions for the game whilst also confirming the children's enjoyment of the prototype

Towards human control of robot swarms

In this paper we investigate principles of swarm control that enable a human operator to exert influence on and control large swarms of robots. We present two principles, coined selection and beacon control, that differ with respect to their temporal and spatial persistence. The former requires active selection of groups of robots while the latter exerts a passive influence on nearby robots. Both principles are implemented in a testbed in which operators exert influence on a robot swarm by switching between a set of behaviors ranging from trivial behaviors up to distributed autonomous algorithms. Performance is tested in a series of complex foraging tasks in environments with different obstacles ranging from open to cluttered and structured. The robotic swarm has only local communication and sensing capabilities with the number of robots ranging from 50 to 200. Experiments with human operators utilizing either selection or beacon control are compared with each other and to a simple autonomous swarm with regard to performance, adaptation to complex environments, and scalability to larger swarms. Our results show superior performance of autonomous swarms in open environments, of selection control in complex environments, and indicate a potential for scaling beacon control to larger swarms

A multi-touch interface for multi-robot path planning and control

In the last few years, research in human-robot interaction has moved beyond the issues concerning the design of the interaction between a person and a single robot. Today many researchers have shifted their focus toward the problem of how humans can control a multi-robot team. The rising of multi-touch devices provides a new range of opportunities in this sense. Our research seeks to discover new insights and guidelines for the design of multi-touch interfaces for the control of biologically inspired multi-robot teams. We have developed an iPad touch interface that lets users exert partial control over a set of autonomous robots. The interface also serves as an experimental platform to study how human operators design multi-robot motion in a pursuit-evasion setting

The Ubiquitous Interactor - Device Independent Access to Mobile Services

The Ubiquitous Interactor (UBI) addresses the problems of design and development that arise around services that need to be accessed from many different devices. In UBI, the same service can present itself with different user interfaces on different devices. This is done by separating interaction between users and services from presentation. The interaction is kept the same for all devices, and different presentation information is provided for different devices. This way, tailored user interfaces for many different devices can be created without multiplying development and maintenance work. In this paper we describe the system design of UBI, the system implementation, and two services implemented for the system: a calendar service and a stockbroker service