A preliminary field-trial investigation of enhancing a commercial telepesence robot with semi-autonomous navigation @Home

Recently, the market of telepresence robots has a great growth especially given the increasing demand for improving patient care by providing a direct link with doctors and caregivers. However, driving the current commercial telepresence robots seems not trivial given the limited (or even absent) robot autonomy capabilities. This paper presents and evaluates a preliminary field-trial to enhance a commercial telepresence robot with limited computational resources with a semi-autonomous navigation system. The system is designed to facilitate teleoperation by relying on enhanced robot capabilities of contextualizing the environment and the human intervention via high-level directional commands. Participants were required to drive the robot in a real house from the living room to the bedroom passing through a corridor, open space and not target rooms. The robot moved in autonomy, the participants were asked to intervene by sending commands when they thought it was necessary to complete the task. The navigation task was accomplished with success thanks to the cooperation between the robot awareness and the operators. Results on the human evaluation in terms of trust and the workload suggest a low level of risk perception, effort, and frustration.