Performance and Situation Awareness Effects in Collaborative Robot Control with Automation

Abstract

Human operators of robotic systems need to be able to acquire and maintain situation awareness (SA) in many domains in order to effectively task and control unmanned systems. Overall task performance is impacted by the SA that individuals or teams develop on the robot, the remote environment, and the tasks to be completed. Situation awareness can be limited by attentional resource limits, particularly when operators must operate multiple systems, some of which may be under automated functioning. In this study we investigate the effects of robot control requirements, including robots under semi-autonomous control, in a task requiring coordination and shared control of a robotic system, on task performance and operator situation awareness.