26. What the Robot's Camera Tells the Operator's Brain

Abstract

Imagine trying to navigate through your environment while looking straight ahead through a narrow tube. These are essentially the conditions the operator of an ROV in teleoperation mode may have to contend with. We hypothesized that controlling ground-based ROVs would be easier if an operator developed an explicit overview of the space in which the ROV was maneuvering. Accordingly, we conducted a study in which we had naive undergraduate participants explore a maze-like virtual desert environment while drawing a map of the area. After completing a 30-min mapping task, participants re-entered the maze to search for and retrieve a target object. The virtual robots and landscape, which had minimal landmarks and a maze of navigable paths (see Fig. 1), were created using CeeBot (see Chadwick, Gillan, Simon, & Pazuchanics, 2004, for a discussion of the CeeBot tool). Maps drawn by participants were rated independently by three raters (graduate psychology students) for the usefulness of the map for navigating the area on a scale from 1 (not at all useful) to 7 (extremely useful). Cronbach's alpha was computed as a consistency estimate of inter-rater reliability at 0.96.

Citation

Chadwick, R.A., Pazuchanics, S.L. and Gillan, D.J. (2006), "26. What the Robot's Camera Tells the Operator's Brain", Cooke, N.J., Pringle, H.L., Pedersen, H.K. and Connor, O. (Ed.) Human Factors of Remotely Operated Vehicles (Advances in Human Performance and Cognitive Engineering Research, Vol. 7), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 373-384. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1479-3601(05)07026-8