Development and Evaluation of an Intuitive Flexible Interface for Teleoperating Soft Growing Robots

Mobility by growth is a new paradigm in robotic systems design and their applications in the real world. Soft, tip-extending, or 'growing', robots have potential applications including inspection and navigation in disaster scenarios. However, due to their growing capability, such robots create unique challenges for intuitive human control. In this paper, a new flexible interface is proposed to intuitively map human bending commands into movements of the growing robot while providing shape information of the robot in order to improve situational awareness. Several command mappings are proposed, and a subjective study was conducted to assess the intuitiveness of the developed interface and mappings compared with other commercially available interfaces. The interfaces were evaluated using four metrics in two virtual task scenarios. The proposed interface with shape mapping performed better than the other interfaces, especially when the vine robot rolls over unintentionally during complex tasks.