Teleoperating Multi-robot Furniture Exploring Methods to Remotely Arrange Multiple Furniture Robots Deployed in a Multi-use Space

This paper presents the first study evaluating methods in remote teleoperation of multi-robot furniture for realistic applications. In a within-subjects user study (N = 12), we tested two robot control methods designed to work at different levels of abstraction in a custom web-based user interface (UI): clicking and dragging to indicate a desired position and orientation for a single ChairBot ("set goal"), and selecting from a list of preset arrangements for multiple ChairBots ("select arrangement"). Participants were asked to use this UI to rearrange ChairBots in a living room across three birthday-themed arrangement prompts. We found overlapping preferences for how distinct participants set of the room for particular party phases, and received high experience and usability ratings for the novel web-based multi-ChairBot controller design. Self-reported survey responses suggest that our design is easy to learn and usable. Our works provides insight to future controls design for and research on multi-robot furniture systems.