Graphical narrative interfaces: Representing spatiotemporal information for a highly autonomous human-robot team

Having a well-developed Graphical User Interface (GUI) is often necessary for a human-robot team, especially when the human and the robot are not in close proximity to each other or when the human does not interact with the robot in real time. Most current GUIs process and display information in real time, but the time to interact with these systems does not scale well when the complexity of the displayed information increases or when information must be fused to support decision-making. We propose a new interface concept, a Graphical Narrative Interface (GNI), which presents story-based summaries driven by accumulated data. We hypothesize that the GNI allows users to search and analyze spatiotemporal information more easily and quickly than a typical GUI. This paper (a) uses literature and preliminary GNI designs to identify a set of design requirements and (b) develops a conceptual GNI implementation that satisfies these requirements.