Teleoperation of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), particularly for inspection of unstructured and unfamiliar environments still raises important challenges from the point of view of the operator interface. One of these challenges is caused by the fact that all information available to the operator is presented to the operator through a computer interface, providing only a partial view of the robot situation. The majority of existing interfaces provides information using visual, and, less frequently, sound channels. The lack of situation awareness (SA), caused by this partial view, may lead to an incorrect and inefficient response to the current UGV state, usually confusing and frustrating the human operator. For instance, the UGV may become stuck in debris while the operator struggles to move the robot, not understanding the cause of the UGV lack of motion. We address this problem by studying the use of haptic feedback to improve operator SA. More precisely, improving SA with respect to the traction state of the UGV, using a haptic tablet for both commanding the robot and conveying traction state to the user by haptic feedback. We report 1) a teleoperating interface, integrating a haptic tablet with an existing UGV teleoperation interface and 2) the experimental results of a user study designed to evaluate the advantage of this interface in the teleoperation of a UGV, in a search and rescue scenario. Statistically significant results were found supporting the hypothesis that using the haptic tablet elicits a reduction in the time that the UGV spends in states without traction.
Stereoscopic displays can simulate the perception of depth information, potentially increasing human distance perception in remote viewing scenarios such as those involved in robotic tele-operation. However, distance perception is a complex perceptual task that is not yet fully understood. Two current research issues are how different stereoscopic displays and viewing heights affect egocentric distance perception. This paper describes an experiment conducted to investigate these issues. It compared distance perception in a real environment with that in identical visual scenes observed through an HMD and 3D Stereo Display. Other parameters, notably field of view, were tightly controlled. Motivated by fact that many teleoperation scenarios involve near ground viewing positions (due to the fact that many robots are small), the study also explored the impact of viewing height (at 20 cm and 110 cm) on distance perception. Results indicated substantial under-estimation of distance across all conditions. Interesting, low eye-height led to a significant reduction in the level of underestimation in the HMD and 3D Stereo Display, a variation that may be due to changes in the perceived height of the horizon in the real world 20 cm viewing height condition, compared to the fixed height of the perceived horizon in the videos shown on the HMD and 3D Stereo Display.
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