Give me the control, I can see the robot!

Abstract

Emergency and exploration missions are accomplished by remote stationary personnel and on-site responders that can deploy robots for dealing with situations involving hazard or inaccessibility. Thus, human-robot interaction (HRI) plays a key role in these kinds of applications. Intra-scenario operator mobility is often considered to be advantageous for acquiring situational awareness (SA) in the context of robot teleoperation, but non portable devices can provide a greater volume of processed information. This should not be discounted when trying to build more effective human-robot interaction (HRI) in search and rescue (SAR) or exploration missions. In this paper, we report a set of experiments comparing a desktop-based interface with a PDA-based interface for remote control of mobile robots. Our goal is two-fold. First we aim at defining which kinds of operators have the best SA under different conditions. Second, we investigate a control transfer policy for determining when an operator should hand over to another, depending on the device, the task and the context.