How training and experience affect the benefits of autonomy in a dirty-bomb experiment

Abstract

A dirty-bomb experiment conducted at the INL is used to evaluate the effectiveness and suitability of three different modes of robot control. The experiment uses three distinct user groups to understand how participants' background and training affect the way in which they use and benefit from autonomy. The results show that the target mode, which involves automated mapping and plume tracing together with a point and click tasking tool, provides the best performance for each group. This is true for objective performance such as source detection and localization accuracy as well as subjective measures such as perceived workload, frustration and preference. The best overall performance is achieved by the Explosive Ordinance Disposal group which has experience in both robot teleoperation and dirty bomb response. The user group that benefits least from autonomy is the Nuclear Engineers that have no experience with either robot operation or dirty bomb response. The group that benefits most from autonomy is the Weapons of Mass Destruction Civil Support Team that has extensive experience related to the task, but no robot training.

Using mixed-initiative human-robot interaction to bound performance in a search task

“…This means that the set of operators using target mode exhibited a 70% reduction in the performance spread between participants, or, independent of their individual proficiency and navigational strategy. The notion of using the mixed-initiative target mode to mitigate effects on performance is further strengthened by the original findings that showed how the target mode mitigated the variance among individual performances with respect to the localization accuracy [4]. Together, the studies indicate that a properly constructed mixed-initiative solution mitigates performance variance that could be based on different levels of training and experience, or the type of strategy used to search the environment.…”

“…go there, or look here, grab that, etc). Our research efforts have been validated over numerous user studies including novices [3,17] and domain experts [4,5,18].…”

“…This experiment was originally reported in [4], but new analysis methods have revealed significant results were unavailable previously. We next review the "dirty-bomb" experiment and discuss the new findings.…”

Comparing Heads-up, Hands-free Operation of Ground Robots to Teleoperation

“…Luck and colleagues found that fully autonomous waypoint navigation yielded the least impact from latency problems and best performance on a navigation task when compared to less autonomous teleoperation interfaces [25]. Finally, Bruemmer et al's findings provide further support to this result; they showed that novices familiar with the task domain but unfamiliar with robot control benefited more than expert operators when using autonomous waypoint navigation [26]. Although these studies found an increase in autonomy to be beneficial, the operator was not walking around test areas with the robot.…”

Pre-Mapping System with Single Laser Sensor Based on Gmapping Algorithm

“…Such as in that case, bomb disposal experts also use pre-maps. That maps help to define localization of robots in indoor environments to intervention to the bomb by robots [5]. These techniques have been developed to intervene to the bomb in short time for indoor environments and this will prevent late responses caused by missing plans or duration of reaching the plan of building.…”