Performance, Power, and Place - User Experience of Contactless Object Manipulation in Robotic Telepresence.

Most robotic telepresence systems are severely limited in their ability to physically interact with surrounding objects. The solution we propose, “double remote control”, or DRC, is to make it possible for the user controlling the telepresence robot (“the pilot”), to also remotely control objects in the robot's physical environment. This paper reports a user experience study, comparing a Wizard of Oz-style prototype of a DRC-enabled environment with a control condition, in which DRC was not enabled. The participants, who acted as either remote pilots (NP=16) or local people in the robot's proximity (NLP=16), were asked to carry out joint activities in each of these conditions. It was found that DRC had a generally positive effect on how participants, and especially pilots, performed their tasks, but the impact of DRC on the social context of interaction was mixed.