Attaining situational awareness for sliding autonomy

摘要

We are interested in the problem of a human operator who has to respond to requests for help from an autonomous robotic construction team. A difficult aspect of this problem is gaining an awareness of the requesting robot’s situation quickly enough to avoid slowing the whole team down. One approach to speeding the initial acquisition of situational awareness is to maintain a buffer of data, and play it back for the human when their help is needed. The paper reports on an experiment to determine the proper composition and length of this buffer for our domain of multi-robot construction. The experiments show that 5- 10 seconds of one raw video feed in combination with a processed display led to the fastest operator attainment of situational awareness. We draw several conclusions from this experiment, which may generalize to other scenarios.