Design and Evaluation of a Flexible Interface for Spatial Navigation

The paper tackles the problem of designing intuitive graphical interfaces for selecting navigational targets for an autonomous robot. Our work focuses on the design and validation of such a flexible interface for an intelligent wheelchair navigating in a large indoor environment. We begin by describing the robot platform and interface design. We then present results from a user study in which participants were required to select navigational targets using a variety of input and filtering methods. We considered two types of input modalities (point-and-click and single-switch), to investigate the effect of constraints on the input mode. We take a particular look at the use of filtering methods to reduce the amount of information presented onscreen and thereby accelerate selection of the correct option.