Immersive telepresence on the operation of unmanned vehicles

Eduardo Jose Fabris,Vicenzo Abichequer Sangalli,Márcio Sarroglia Pinho,Leonardo Pavanatto Soares

doi:10.1177/1729881420978544

Abstract

Unmanned ground vehicles are usually deployed in situations, where it is too dangerous or not feasible to have an operator onboard. One challenge faced when such vehicles are teleoperated is maintaining a high situational awareness, due to aspects such as limitation of cameras, characteristics of network transmission, and the lack of other sensory information, such as sounds and vibrations. Situation awareness refers to the understanding of the information, events, and actions that will impact the execution and the objectives of the tasks at the current and near future of the operation of the vehicle. This work investigates how the simultaneous use of immersive telepresence and mixed reality could impact the situation awareness of the operator and the navigation performance. A user study was performed to compare our proposed approach with a traditional unmanned vehicle control station. Quantitative data obtained from the vehicle’s behavior and the situation awareness global assessment technique were used to analyze such impacts. Results provide evidence that our approach is relevant when the task requires a detailed observation of the surroundings, leading to higher situation awareness and navigation performance.

Highlights

Unmanned vehicles[1] are used in situations that require human action in an inaccessible or dangerous place, where there is a need to keep human beings distant
The second refers to the effect of using the same system in the situation awareness of the participant
We analyzed the graphs generated from the data, all of the variables that described the performance of the vehicle and the operator, and the trajectories described by the remote vehicle in the accomplished missions

Summary

Introduction

Unmanned vehicles[1] are used in situations that require human action in an inaccessible or dangerous place, where there is a need to keep human beings distant. A location can store toxic or explosive material, present a risk of collapse, be in a zone of urban violence, be a possible target for terrorists, or even be located in a war zone These vehicles have capabilities that allow the execution of activities that would be performed by a human being if he were at the remote location. One possible solution for the control of these vehicles is the automatic calculation of their trajectories, using, for example, mathematical linguistics and relational algebra,[4] probabilistic approximations like simulated annealing[5] or assisted control, as in the case of the work of Pivarciova.[6].

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion