Performance metrics and human-robot interaction for teleoperated systems

This thesis investigates human factors issues in the design and development of effective human-robot interfaces for emerging applications of teleoperated, cooperative mobile robot systems in situations such as urban search and rescue. Traditional methods of designing human-robot interaction interfaces have failed to produce effective results as witnessed in the post September 11 search operations. The thesis adopts a user-centric approach based on the human factors of situation awarenes~, telepresence and workload to support the hum'an operator because this is widely accepted as the best way of realising increased levels of collaboration between humans and robotic systems, working as a partnership to perform a complex task. The measurement of these human factors has not been explored within the robotic community in any significant way. The measurement of these subjective and complex issues is addressed in this thesis by looking to the flight traffic control domain where researchers have developed many methods of determining how to quan- .- - .. - ._-------------_._---------------_ ..-----_.._--- tify the quality of situation awareness, the level of workload and the level of telepresence of the people in the aircrafts and on the ground. Based on these methods, the research proposes five new methods (ASAGAT, QASAGAT, CARS, PASA, SPASA) for measuring situation awareness, three methods (WSPQ, SUSPQ, SPATP) for measuring telepresence and three methods (NASA-TLX, MCRS, FSWAT) for measuririg workload. A comprehensive comparison between them has shown that QASAGAT and SPASA are the most reliable and accurate for measuring situation awareness, SPATP for measuring telepresence and FSWAT for measuring workload. For the measurement of performance a new method has been developed, which is felt to be more objective for the urban search and rescue scenario than the metrics used in the RoboCup Rescue competition. Simulation studies involved extensive investigations to determine the various software tools and platforms that are available for realising robot urban search and rescue scenarios. The software of Player-Gazebo was selected as the best solution. A graphical user interface· comprising vision, laser data, map, robot locations, etc. was developed and assessed with the proposed measurement methods under the simulated robot system and search scenarios. The test subjects comprised specialist end users as well as general non-end users. . An in-between groups analysis showed that the individual characteristics of each group may have some effect on the experimental variables, however, this effect is very minimal and the l?ain influence factors are the interaction interfaces and the human factors investigated here. Moreover, the results indicated that there is no significant benefit when using professional urban search and rescue end users. Correlation analysis on the data has shown that situation awareness and telepresence have a positive effect on performance, while workload negatively affects performance. It was also found that there is a positive correlation between situation awareness and telepresence, while workload has a negative effect on both. These results validate the assumptions made. __________Amultiple.linearregressionmodel has_been.developed _to further _l.lnderstand.the _ individual contributions of each human factor in the overall performance achieved. The limited prediction capabilities of th'-e linear model suggested anon-linear relationship. For this reason,'- a non-linear model using an artificial neural network trained with the backpropagation algorithm has also been developed. The resulting neural network is able to predict the response variables more precisely and is shown to be able to generalise well to unseen cases. A physical mobile teleoperated urban search and rescue robot system has also been developed for realising future real world trials.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo