Purpose: Over the last few decades, the development of the hardware and software has enabled the application of advanced systems. In the robotics field, the UI design is an intriguing area to be explored due to the creation of devices with a wide range of functionalities in a reduced size. Moreover, the idea of using the same UI to control several systems arouses a great interest considering that this involves less learning effort and time for the users. Therefore, this paper will present a mobile application to control two industrial robots with four modes of operation. Design/methodology/approach: The smartphone was selected to be the interface due to its wide range of capabilities and the MIT Inventor App was used to create the application, whose environment is supported by Android smartphones. For the validation, ROS was used since it is a fundamental framework utilised in industrial robotics and the Arduino Uno was used to establish the data transmission between the smartphone and the board NVIDIA Jetson TX2. In MIT Inventor App, the graphical interface was created to visualize the options available in the app whereas two scripts in python were programmed to perform the simulations in ROS and carry out the tests. Findings: The results indicated that the use of the sliders to control the robots is more favourable than the Orientation Sensor due to the sensibility of the sensor and human limitations to hold the smartphone perfectly still. Another important finding was the limitations of the autonomous mode, in which the robot grabs an object. In this case, the configuration of the Kinect camera and the controllers has a significant impact on the success of the simulation. Finally, it was observed that the delay was appropriate despite the use of the Arduino UNO to transfer the data between the Smartphone and the Nvidia Jetson TX2.

翻译：目的：过去几十年，硬件与软件的发展使得先进系统的应用成为可能。在机器人领域，由于设备在小型化基础上集成广泛功能，用户界面设计成为值得探索的有趣方向。此外，使用同一界面控制多个系统的想法引起了极大兴趣，因为这能减少用户的学习投入与时间成本。因此，本文将介绍一款可控制两台工业机器人、支持四种操作模式的移动应用程序。设计/方法论/方法：鉴于智能手机的广泛功能，我们选择其作为交互界面，并使用MIT Inventor App开发应用程序，该环境支持Android智能手机。验证阶段采用工业机器人领域的基础框架ROS，并通过Arduino Uno实现智能手机与NVIDIA Jetson TX2板卡间的数据传输。在MIT Inventor App中创建图形界面以展示应用的可用选项，同时编写两个Python脚本用于ROS仿真模拟及测试执行。研究发现：结果表明，由于传感器的灵敏度及用户无法完美保持智能手机静止的人体限制，使用滑块控制机器人比方向传感器更具优势。另一重要发现是自主模式下机器人抓取物件的局限性——此时Kinect摄像头与控制器的配置对仿真成功具有显著影响。最后观察到，尽管使用Arduino UNO在智能手机与Nvidia Jetson TX2间传输数据，但延迟仍在可接受范围内。