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Designing and Evaluating a User Interface for Multi-Robot Furniture
A chair, once placed, will stay put until moved. Or will it? With the rise of technology being embeddable into everyday objects, what if that chair could move itself? Such robotic furniture has been featured in advertisements, art, and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research. Existing methods for operating robotic furniture have been limited to commands at a low level of abstraction which limits the number of furniture robots usable at once as the operator becomes overwhelmed. This thesis explores how user interfaces can support the needs of human operators and interaction partners for arranging multi-robot furniture by iterating an interface for operating three chair robots (ChairBots) over two experiments. The first explores multi-robot furniture in a needfinding experiment to derive user-centric requirements. These requirements included a screen-based modality, autonomy, and geometric (i.e., spatial furniture-specific) intelligence. Requirements were met by implementing high-level affordances, and precise motion on the ChairBots. The second experiment extended the screen-based interface to enable tele-operation over the internet and refined affordances to three diverse levels of abstraction. This iteration of the interface was evaluated in a novelly remote user study wherein participants arranged the ChairBots in a simulated multi-phase event. Participants were able to arrange the ChairBots successfully proving the utility of a screen-based interface, and affordances at diverse levels of abstraction. Insights from this research can be used by future designers of multi-robot furniture and HRI researchers alike