Effects of Tacton Names and Learnability

摘要

Increasing robotic capabilities and a strong impetus for mixed-initiative Soldier-Robot teaming is pushing the boundaries of current communication paradigms. These future teams are expected to perform along a continuum of operating environments, in which traditional auditory and visual modalities may be hindered or unavailable. The tactile modality offers an alternative means for a robot to communicate words, phrases, or cues to a Soldier, providing an additional channel to facilitate more robust multimodal communications. However, fundamental research is still needed to understand how to design tactile icons called "tactons." In order to better understand the relationship of a tacton and their assigned names, this paper presents results from an experiment comparing the ability of participants to classify existing tactons from the literature using original versus nonsense-syllable labels.