Adverb Palette: GUI-based Support for Human Interaction in Multi-Objective Path-Planning

Many fields of study involve decision-making where trade-offs between different desirable outcomes are to be made. This paper introduces four designs for a graphical user interface ( GUI ) called the Adverb Palette ( AP ) to support interactive robot path-planning under multiple performance objectives. The GUI designs apply when the robot must go from an initial configuration to a goal configuration while honoring competing objectives. This novel human-robot interface helps the operator issue commands to the robot to take a specific path from the many available paths, thereby helping the user in decision making process. AP is a metaphor that symbolizes an artist's palette where an artist mixes different colors to get a desired shade of color. For the principal GUI designs, each objective is represented as a color. Since we assume that the human specifies the objectives using language, each objective is metaphorically called an adverb . Two of the approaches, the sliders and the waypoints indicator , have been explored by the researchers in the past, and the other two, palette and prism are novel and may be more useful and intuitive.