ASTEROIDS: Exploring Swarms of Mini-Telepresence Robots for Physical Skill Demonstration

Online synchronous tutoring allows for immediate engagement between instructors and audiences over distance. However, tutoring physical skills remains challenging because current telepresence approaches may not allow for adequate spatial awareness, viewpoint control of the demonstration activities scattered across an entire work area, and the instructor’s sufficient awareness of the audience. We present Asteroids, a novel approach for tangible robotic telepresence, to enable workbench-scale physical embodiments of remote people and tangible interactions by the instructor. With Asteroids, the audience can actively control a swarm of mini-telepresence robots, change camera positions, and switch to other robots’ viewpoints. Demonstrators can perceive the audiences’ physical presence while using tangible manipulations to control the audience’s viewpoints and presentation flow. We conducted an exploratory evaluation for Asteroids with 12 remote participants in a model-making tutorial scenario with an architectural expert demonstrator. Results suggest our unique features benefitted participants’ engagement, sense of presence, and understanding.