Auditory interface for teleoperation - Path following experimental results

Abstract

For teloperated unmanned vehicles, mishaps tend to occur during the periods of high workload, in situations where the operator must perform complex and stressful tasks. However, with many tasks performed simultaneously with flying, the relevant information is typically dispersed on a number of screens overloading the operator's visual channel. In order to address these unique human-factors problems associated with unmanned vehicles we suggest the use of an auditory display as a mean to reduce visual workload, to enhance situation awareness, and mitigate the visual and cognitive demands of contemporary marine teleoperations. Experiments were performed on the remotely operated surface marine platform (PlaDyPos) developed at the Laboratory for Underwater Systems and Technologies, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb. The results show that the concept, guidance-by-sound is feasible in the real environment. The results are in line with previously obtained results from the real-time simulator showing that tracking quality can be further improved introducing supernormal auditory cues in order to provide better-than-normal operator's auditory resolution in the frontal region. We conclude that the use of hearing in the form of the auditory display emerges as an important advantage. Since practice has a major effect on performance, there is definitely more room for improvement in using interfaces we are not trained for.