A laser pointer can be a powerful tool for robot control. It can accurately point to real world locations. However, previous studies only used it for target designation and did not fully explore its potential as a versatile input device. This study proposes a user interface using a laser pointer for giving various instructions to a robot. The basic idea is to apply stroke gesture recognition to laser trajectory. The user can specify the type of task and the target position, as well as target objects. We conducted user studies for first-time users using a prototype implementation and refined it. The participans using the final design were able to get accustomed using the final design of our interface in ten minutes.
Kentaro Ishii, Shengdong Zhao, Masahiko Inami, Takeo Igarashi, Michita Imai.
Designing Laser Gesture Interface for Robot Control.
The 12th IFIP Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol.5727, pp.479-492, August 2009.
[PDF] [Video]