Wiimote controlled Aibo

Technology

wiiaibo_20071122.jpg

What works well for a gaming input device also appears to be a useful tool for human robot interaction. University of Calgary students Cheng Guo and Ehud Sharlin performed a study in which participants tried to pose Aibos and navigate them through obstacles using both keyboards and a Wiimote-based gesture interface:

For the navigation tasks we did not expect that there would
be a significant difference between the numbers of errors
participants made using the different techniques. However,
the data showed the opposite. Participants made 43% more
errors with the keypad interface than with the Wiimote
interface in the navigation tasks. Many participants felt that
this was due to the small key size and the unintuitive
mapping between buttons and robot actions.

Moreover, gesture input tends to support simultaneous input
compared to button input. As one of the participants
commented, “I could do both hands (both arm movements)
at the same time without a lot of logical thinking (with the
Wiimote/Nunchuk interface), where with the keyboard I
had to press one (button) and the other (button) if I was
doing two hand movements at the same time. Although they
would be intime.”

I wonder if the same holds true as the gestures become more complex to support a larger command set. For a reduced set of instructions, however, this really makes a lot of sense. Knowing the spatial position of your hands is completely second-nature, making simple gestures much more intuitive than pressing keys on a keyboard.

Wiimote controlled Aibo – Link, Paper (PDF)

0 thoughts on “Wiimote controlled Aibo

  1. ggrk says:

    To make the extender antenna the wire used must be made of copper *without* any plastic coating. The plastic on a wire alters the velocity factor of the wire and detunes the antenna. An antenna made from a plastic coated wire will be shorter in length than a plain one. The efficiency will also be reduced.

  2. Anonymous says:

    Isn’t it a porn image on the bottom right corner in the last sequence ?
    I was distracted by it and looking at it closely reveals to me what seem to be a girl on top of a guy… or it’s just me :)

  3. Anonymous says:

    nice one… mcgyver…lol…

  4. Sridhar says:

    Tried and works like a charm. Tip. I found it difficult to make a perfect coil (final result did not have any geometrical shape) using a wood screw. I used a stirrer instead, its diameter was around ½ of the drinking straw, and after making the required turns stretched the coil a bit (to ensure the coils do not touch adjacent turns).

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