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.