Ecological Interfaces for Improving Mobile Robot Teleoperation

Navigation is an essential element of many remote robot operations including search and rescue, reconnaissance, and space exploration. Previous reports on using remote mobile robots suggest that navigation is difficult due to poor situation awareness. It has been recommended by experts in human-robot interaction that interfaces between humans and robots provide more spatial information and better situational context in order to improve an operator´s situation awareness. This paper presents an ecological interface paradigm that combines video, map, and robot-pose information into a 3-D mixed-reality display. The ecological paradigm is validated in planar worlds by comparing it against the standard interface paradigm in a series of simulated and real-world user studies. Based on the experiment results, observations in the literature, and working hypotheses, we present a series of principles for presenting information to an operator of a remote robot.