Abstract – Mobile robots operating in home environments must deal with constrained space and a great variety of obstacles and situations to handle. This article presents a pilot study aiming at identifying design specifications of a new user interface and robot specifications to improve efficiency and security for novice teleoperators of a mobile robot used in home environments. This pilot study is part of the familiarization phase of an iterative interdisciplinary design process aiming at outlining critical design and experimental issues before engaging into detailed design processes, elaborated experimental methodology and rigorous testing of the various capabilities of mobile robots for home care applications. More specifically, we evaluated, with a small set of trained and untrained operators, two conceptually different user interfaces for teleoperated mobile robotic systems. These results demonstrate the challenges and the necessity of conducting trials in home environments to evaluate such teleoperated systems, and outline distinct preferences regarding robot capabilities, user interface navigation method and evaluation methodology.

Abstract—There is considerable interest in real-world formation-maintenance tasks, where robots move together while maintaining a geometric shape. This interest is motivated by promise of robustly and efficiently moving multiple robots along a path, guided by a human operator. This paper presents a comprehensive set of techniques that fulfill this promise: (i) a novel method for fusing open- and closed- loop controllers, for robust formation-maintenance; (ii) an ecological display, allowing a human operator to monitor and guide robots, while improving their performance and reducing the failure rate; and (iii) a set of methods for interacting with the formation in the case of a disconnect in the formation. We evaluate each of these contributions in extensive experiments, including 25 human operators. We show significant improvements in performance (in terms of movement time), robustness (both in number of failures, as well as failure rate), and consistency between operators. I.

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Most of the feedback received by operators of current robotteleoperation systems is graphical. When a large variety of robot data needs to be displayed however, this may lead to operator overload. The research presented in this paper focuses on offloading part of the feedback to other human senses, specifically to the sense of touch, to reduce the load due to the interface, and as a consequence, to increase the level of operator situation awareness. Graphical and vibro-tactile versions of feedback delivery for collision interfaces were evaluated in a search task using a virtual teleoperated robot. Parameters measured included task time, number of collisions between the robot and the environment, number of objects found and the quality of post-experiment reports through the use of sketch maps. Our results indicate that the combined use of both graphical and vibro-tactile feedback interfaces led to an increase in the quality of sketch maps, a possible indication of increased levels of operator situation awareness, but also a slight decrease in the number of robot collisions.

Robot teleoperation interfaces are mostly graphics based nowadays, that is, all the information the operator receives is presented on a screen. Complex robot interfaces may lead to operator cognitive overload. The use of other senses to receive part of the data sensed and transmitted by the robot may help reduce this overload and thus enhance the performance of the operator. This paper aims at measuring the benefits of using vibrotactile feedback in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) interface design specifically for an urban search and rescue (USAR) system. Our hypothesis is that the use of collisionproximity feedback interfaces (CPFs) should lead to an improvement of an HRI system performance by increasing the operator’s situation awareness (SA) and reducing cognitive load. Additionally, it should be flexible enough to be adapted to different HRI USAR systems. A user study encompassing a search task was performed to evaluate this new interface. An in-between subjects experiment tested the effect of both graphical and vibro-tactile CPF interfaces on performance in a simple search task in a virtual collapsedbuilding environment. Performance and situation awareness were measured based on task time, number of collisions with the environment, number of objects found and correct report of environment using sketchmaps. First, the results of this research highlight the importance of a homogeneity verification in the experiment groups, which is generally not reported in most research results but that can drastically affect the results of an experiment. Second, our results indicate how previous experience can affect subjects’ performance. Videogame experience seemed to have a slight impact on the performance of subjects. Third and most importantly, our results have indicated that the use of both vibrotactile and graphical feedback interfaces may improve operator’s performance in a search environment, and may indicate an increase in operator situation awareness (SA). Future enhancements in our system to better approximate it to a real robot control experience will help us consolidate the initial results obtained here.

Abstract — In this paper, a multi-agent search scheme is presented that supports the recognition of activities and, thus, learning methods for cooperative human-robot interaction. In our approach, stochastic models of human search activity are used to estimate state for HRI. The robot updates a Probabilistic Distribution Function of the target object using the observations and the estimated state of human peers. By this means the robot can choose places to search to compensate the behavior of human peers. This paper also presents an implicit interface design for robot assisted tasks, which allows the robot to infer the intention of the user and to provide assistance autonomously. It reduces the cognitive workload of the user and therefore is useful for elder care applications. The effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed approaches are demonstrated in the experimental results. I.

There is growing recognition that many applications of robots will require a human operator to supervise and control multiple robots that collaborate to achieve the operator’s goals. However, the bulk of existing work in this area assumes that robots are independent of each other, and thus ignores key challenges and opportunities in monitoring and operating tightly-coordinating teams. This thesis takes steps to address these open issues. First, we address the challenge of effectively monitoring multiple coordinating robots. We introduce a graphical socially-attentive display that explicitly shows the state of coordination in the team, in terms of the robots’ state with respect to each other. As a result, the operator can easily detect coordination failures, even before these cause overall failure in the task. Second, we show that in resolving contingencies (call-requests), an opportunity exists for taking advantage of the robots ’ teamwork, to allow the robots to actively assist the operator. We propose a distributed approach to call-request resolution (including two variations), and an implementation method for behavior-based robots. This implementation method allows the

The attention paid to human-robot interaction (HRI) issues has grown dramatically as robotic systems have become more capable and as human contact with those systems has become more commonplace. Along with the

Robots are used today to accomplish many tasks in society, be it in industry, at home, or as helping tools on tragic incidents. The human-robot systems currently developed span a broad variety of applications and are typically very different from one another. The interaction techniques designed for each system are also very different, although some effort has been directed in defining common properties and strategies for guiding human-robot interaction (HRI) development. This work aims to present the state-of-the-art in teleoperation interaction techniques between robots and their users. By presenting potentially useful design models and motivating discussions on topics to which the research community has been paying little attention lately, we also suggest solutions to some of the design and operational problems being faced in this area. ii Index

Design guidelines and metrics proposed for robot teleoperation interfaces [Steinfeld et al., 2006] tend to be difficult to apply due to high specialization of systems. Also, most guidelines only consider visual displays. Our interface uses tactile cues