Abstract

Teleoperation of Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) is dependent on several factors as the human operator is physically detached from the UGV. This paper focuses on situations where a UGV designed for search and rescue loses traction, thus becoming unable to comply with the operator's commands. In such situations, the lack of Situation Awareness (SA) may lead to an incorrect and inefficient response to the current UGV state usually confusing and frustrating the human operator. The exclusive use of visual information to simultaneously perform the main task (e.g. search and rescue) and to be aware of possible impediments to UGV operation, such as loss of traction, becomes a very challenging task for a single human operator. We address the challenge of unburdening the visual channel by using other human senses to provide multimodal feedback in UGV teleoperation. To achieve this goal we present a teleoperation architecture comprising (1) a laser-based traction detector module, to discriminate between traction losses (stuck and sliding) and (2) a haptic interface to convey the detected traction state to the human operator through different types of tactile stimuli provided by three haptic devices (E-Vita, Traction Cylinder and Vibrotactile Glove). We also report the experimental results of a user study to evaluate to what extent this new feedback modality improves the user SA regarding the UGV traction state. Statistically significant results were found supporting the hypothesis that two of the haptic devices improved the comprehension of the traction state of the UGV when comparing to exclusively visual modality.

Highlights

  • IntroductionTeleoperation of Unnamed Ground Vehicles (UGVs) allows the human operator to explore remote environments

  • Teleoperation of Unnamed Ground Vehicles (UGVs) allows the human operator to explore remote environments.the fact that the human operator is physically detached from the Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) raises several challenges

  • We address the challenge of unburdening the visual channel by using other human senses to provide multimodal feedback in UGV teleoperation

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Summary

Introduction

Teleoperation of Unnamed Ground Vehicles (UGVs) allows the human operator to explore remote environments. The fact that the human operator is physically detached from the UGV raises several challenges. One particular challenge consists in providing an effective awareness of the robot situation, known as Situation Awareness. This paper focuses on the problem of dealing with situations where the UGV for search and rescue loses traction and is unable to comply with a human operator’s commands. In these situations, awareness of traction loss is compromised by the physical detachment of the operator with respect to the UGV. The concept of Situation Awareness (SA) was formally

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