Multimodal Interface of Teleoperated Robotic Agent for Patient with Disabilities

Abstract

This paper presents a teleoperated mobile robot system for supporting paralyzed patients. Teleoperated robotic agent can be one of solutions to prevent a decrease of their QOL caused by social isolation. Most of teleoperation systems have interfaces to visually present the state of the robots including feedback information and receive the control commands manually sent from the operator. However, in elderly and patients with disabilities, they might have difficulty in the manual control of the robot. This paper therefore proposes a multimodal interface combining an eye tracking and shifting of body weight for controlling a teleoperated robotic agent. Furthermore, we conducted a preliminary experiment and questionnaire to discuss the effectiveness of the developed interfaces and compare with each other. From the results, we found that the prototype system still had some problems of controlling the mobile robot caused by disturbances in the gaze input display.