| A person's quality of life is impacted when he or she is no longer able to participate in everyday activities with family and friends, which is often the case for people with special needs (e.g., seniors and people with disabilities) who are full time residents at medical and healthcare facilities. We posit that people with special needs may benefit from using telepresence robots to engage in social activities. Telepresence robots provide interactive two-way audio and video communication and can be controlled independently, allowing the person driving to use the robot to look around and explore a remote environment as he or she desires. However, to date, telepresence robots, their user interfaces, and their navigation behaviors have not been designed for use by people with special needs to be the robot operators.;Over the course of three years, we have designed and architected a social telepresence robot research platform based on a VGo Communications' VGo robot. Our work included designing a new processing and sensor system with three cameras to create a wide field of view, and laser range finder to support autonomous navigation. The images from each camera were combined into a vertical panoramic video stream, which was the foundation of our interface. Since the premise of a telepresence robot is that it is an embodiment for its user, we designed and implemented autonomous navigation behaviors that approximated a human's as much as possible, given its inability to independently translate laterally.;This research utilized an iterative, bottom-up, user-centered approach, drawing upon our assistive robotics experiences. We have conducted series of user studies to inform the design of an augmented reality style user interface. We conducted two formative evaluations (a focus group (n=5) and a follow-on "Wizard of Oz" experiment (n=12)) to investigate how members of our target population would want to direct a telepresence robot in a remote environment. Based on these studies, we developed an augmented reality user interface, which focuses primarily on the human-human interaction and communication through video, providing appropriate support for semiautonomous navigation behaviors. We present a case study (n=4), which demonstrates this research as a first critical step towards having our target population take the active role of the telepresence robot operator. |
