Human Robot Interaction and Control: Translating Diagrams into an Intuitive Augmented Reality Approach

Robots will play a vital role in our future personal spaces and we need to provide ways for robots and humans to interact with each other in a way that is natural, intuitive, descriptive and unambiguous. In this paper we introduce a framework that enables a human and robot to naturally interact and communicate with each other using the idea of diagrams. The diagrams are formed by a connected set of object markers placed in the environment. These markers can either be physically present in the environment or virtually present using marker-less technology. This paper presents a marker-less method for globally persistent markers. Diagrams are formed by connecting the objects together enabling the user to easily interact and control the robot in complex ways. We report on a proof-of-concept implementation of our framework and show how the framework can be used to program a robot to carry out navigation and action tasks within an environment.