RemoteCoDe: Robotic Embodiment for Enhancing Peripheral Awareness in Remote Collaboration Tasks

Collaborative design activities are often centered around physical artifacts. Depending on the design activity, this can be the model of a building, paper crafts, carving artwork, or a new circuit to be debugged and evaluated. In a typical setting, collaborators are seated around a table and divide their attention between the design artifact under review, at least one laptop supporting measurements and information foraging, and of course their collaborators. Although these activities involve complex sets of tools and configurations, people can easily work together when they are present in the same space. This is because the physical presence of a partner affords peripheral awareness to inform where the partner's attention is and what they are doing. This peripheral awareness allows collaborators to coordinate actions and manage coupling to achieve a shared task. For example, it is quite easy to know when your partner switches their focus from a breadboard to you as a request to start a face to face discussion.