In this paper, we propose a 1st person view and body motion based control method realized on a smart phone/pad called the Sprint (Smart Phone/Pad and Robot for Teleoperation and Tele-presence). The smart phone/pad is chosen, aside from its ubiquity and wide usage, for its mobility and rich media (sensor/display) capabilities. The key idea of Sprint is to have the operator control and interact by "posing" as the robot in the remote area in hopes of eliciting a high sense of tele-presence and thereby promoting the spatial task performance and the overall interactive experience. In particular, we demonstrate a remote robot viewing control method based on this design principle and validate that the proposed approach does improve the sense of tele-presence and spatial understanding.

In this poster, we present an experiment that compares three forms of interaction to study the user behavior with regards to the effects of camera view for in-situ robot control. We compared three hand-held interfaces with: (1) no camera view (Nominal), (2) a camera view/aim is always fixed toward the robot (Fixed) and (3) a camera view with user controlled aim (Free). The three approaches represent different balances between information availability, interface accessibility and the amount of induced attentional shifts. Experiment results have shown that all three interaction models exhibited similar task performance even though the Fixed type induced much less attentional shifts. On the other hand, the users much preferred the Nominal and Free type. Users mostly ignored the camera view despite having to shift one's attention excessively, due to the lack of visual quality, realistic scale and depth information.

Participating in a play is one of integral curriculum for young children at nurseries and kindergartens. At the same time, it is not very easy to successfully run and manage a play for young children due to their low age and immaturity. Scripts are difficult to memorize and children's attention span is quite short. We are exploring the use of a robot and augmented reality (AR) technology to assist the nursery teachers in hopes to alleviate the difficult and complicated task of running the play, and also as a way to increase the learning effect by promoting the concentration and immersion (by the presence of the robot and novelty of the augmented display) [1, 2, 3]. For this purpose, we have devised a semi-autonomous remote-controlled projector robot with the capabilities of background projection and control, generating the synthesized augmented view, camera/movement control, producing story narration and various special effects. We have recently deployed the robot assistant for a play ('Three Little Pigs') at an actual nursery to observe and investigate various aspects of human robot interaction. For instance, the robot interacts with the actors on stage, leading and guiding them by showing (with small display on the robot) the synthesized augmented view, script guidance, and putting forth and changing the backdrop projection. It also assumes the role of the camera man and may instigate minute interplay with the actor as it zooms in and out on actors (by remote control). Our initial observation indicated that the use of the robot and AR indeed exhibited very high potential in drawing the attention of the children and enhancing the educational effect, but required the right amount of autonomy and external control and an intuitive interface.