Binaural Auditory Information Fusion for Effective Supervisory Control of Mobile Multirobot Systems

Supervisory control of mobile multirobot systems often forces the operator to concurrently process information of multiple visual displays under different task conditions. The approach of this paper is to design and evaluate a multimodal human-robot interface to support the processing of dual tasks. The main innovation of the multimodal interface is the binaural auditory information renderer which allows shifting of state information from the visual to the auditory channel of the operator. The multimodal interface was evaluated in a laboratory study with 20 participants. Dependent variables were human performance and workload. Independent variables were the interface modality (monomodal vs. multimodal) and the number of robots to be supervised (1 or 2 robots). The results show that the binaural information fusion significantly improves human performance and also significantly lowers the subjective workload (alpha = 0.05)