Abstract
Multiple robot missions imply a series of challenges for single human operators, such as managing high workloads or maintaining a correct level of situational awareness. Conventional interfaces are not prepared to face these challenges; however, new concepts have arisen to cover this need, such as adaptive and immersive interfaces. This paper reports the design and development of an adaptive and immersive interface, as well as a complete set of experiments carried out to establish comparisons with a conventional one. The interface object of study has been developed using virtual reality to bring operators into scenarios and allow an intuitive commanding of robots. Additionally, it is able to recognize the mission’s state and show hints to the operators. The experiments were performed in both outdoor and indoor scenarios recreating an intervention after an accident in critical infrastructure. The results show the potential of adaptive and immersive interfaces in the improvement of workload, situational awareness and performance of operators in multi-robot missions.
Highlights
Robots are increasingly filling gaps in our lives
Multiple robot and single operator scenarios imply a series of human factor challenges, such as workload, situational awareness, stress, level of autonomy and trust in automation
Conventional interfaces are not prepared to face these challenges, there are new concepts that can solve them in the future, such as adaptive and immersive interfaces
Summary
Robots are increasingly filling gaps in our lives. In a nutshell, they can carry out the jobs that we cannot or are not willing to do. They can carry out the jobs that we cannot or are not willing to do This is especially interesting with hard or dangerous tasks. A type of missions where robots can be helpful are interventions in disaster areas. Throughout the last decades, rescue teams have been integrating robots in their operations after natural or human-provoked disasters. They have used ground, aerial, surface or underwater robots, and heterogeneous fleets that integrate multiple kinds of robots. Some examples of interventions are the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, the Katrina hurricane in 2005 and the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011 [1]
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