Communicating Robot Motion Intent with Augmented Reality

Humans coordinate teamwork by conveying intent through social cues, such as gestures and gaze behaviors. However, these methods may not be possible for appearance-constrained robots that lack anthropomorphic or zoomorphic features, such as aerial robots. We explore a new design space for communicating robot motion intent by investigating how augmented reality (AR) might mediate human-robot interactions. We develop a series of explicit and implicit designs for visually signaling robot motion intent using AR, which we evaluate in a user study. We found that several of our AR designs significantly improved objective task efficiency over a baseline in which users only received physically-embodied orientation cues. In addition, our designs offer several trade-offs in terms of intent clarity and user perceptions of the robot as a teammate.