This article presents an implementation of a natural-language speech interface and a haptic feedback interface that enables a human supervisor to provide guidance to, request information, and receive status updates from a Spot robot. We provide insights gained during preliminary user testing of the interface in a realistic robot exploration scenario.

Last year marked the 50th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick's space-race era epic, "2001: A Space Odyssey", prompting several outlets to do side-by-side comparisons on how the film's depiction of digital technologies matched up against what we really had around the turn of the century. Of course, no one can do this without mentioning the film's central antagonist, HAL 9000, a sentient computer who interacts with the doomed characters through a verbal interface, reminiscent of the way that contemporary users deploy Amazon's Alexa to order pizza. So, while some might point to this similarity as proof of Kubrick's intuition, the reality is that we have been pushing towards zero U/I, or interfaces that do not rely on screens, for decades. The concept of zero U/I was first defined by then Fjord Design Director, now frog Creative Director, Andy Goodman, during a 2015 speech at San Francisco's Solid Conference. He describes it as a natural approach to user-interface interactions, which abandons the abruptness of the screen in favor of a more natural environment, through which users can communicate with devices using speech, motion, and even thought.