HIDAgent: A Toolkit Enabling"Personal Agents"on HID-Compatible Devices

2026-01-31

AI Summary

This work proposes HIDAgent, a low-cost hardware-software toolkit (under $30) based on the universal Human Interface Device (HID) protocol, to enable AI agents to interact with any HID-compliant device through physical mouse and keyboard emulation—mirroring human input modalities. Unlike existing UI agents that rely on system-specific APIs or VNC, HIDAgent achieves true cross-platform compatibility and physical isolation by decoupling interaction from the underlying operating system. The authors demonstrate its versatility and feasibility through five prototype systems spanning both mobile and desktop platforms, successfully executing diverse tasks without platform-specific customization. This approach significantly broadens the scope of human-AI collaboration research by enabling consistent, real-world physical interaction across heterogeneous computing environments.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Interaction Techniques and Devices
• Intelligent Robots: Human-Robot Interaction
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Agent Architectures

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Research challenges in human and human-AI computation
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions

Abstract

UI Agents powered by increasingly performant AI promise to eventually use computers the way that people do - by visually interpreting UIs on screen and issuing appropriate actions to control them (e.g., mouse clicks and keyboard entry). While significant progress has been made on interpreting visual UIs computationally, and in sequencing together steps to complete tasks, controlling UIs is still done with system-specific APIs or VNC connections, which limits the platforms and use cases that can be explored. This paper introduces HIDAgent, an open-source hardware/software toolkit enabling UI agents to operate HID-compatible computing systems by emulating the physical keyboard and mouse. HIDAgent is built using three off-the-shelf components costing less than $30 and a Python library supporting flexible integration. We validated the HIDAgent toolkit by building five diverse use case prototypes across mobile and desktop platforms. As a hardware device, HIDAgent supports research into new interaction scenarios where the agents are separated from the devices they control.

Problem

• UI Agents
• HID-compatible devices
• system-specific APIs
• cross-platform control
• human-computer interaction

Innovation

• HIDAgent
• UI Agents
• Human Interface Device (HID)
• cross-platform control
• hardware-in-the-loop