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With the progress in robotics research the human machine interfaces reach more and more the status of being the major limiting factor for the overall system performance of a system for remote navigation and coordination of robots. In this monograph it is elaborated how mixed reality technologies can be applied for the user interfaces in order to increase the overall system performance. Concepts, technologies, and frameworks are developed and evaluated in user studies which enable for novel user-centered approaches to the design of mixed-reality user interfaces for remote robot operation. Both the technological requirements and the human factors are considered to achieve a consistent system design. Novel technologies like 3D time-of-flight cameras are investigated for the application in the navigation tasks and for the application in the developed concept of a generic mixed reality user interface. In addition it is shown how the network traffic of a video stream can be shaped on application layer in order to reach a stable frame rate in dynamic networks. The elaborated generic mixed reality framework enables an integrated 3D graphical user interface. The realized spatial integration and visualization of available information reduces the demand for mental transformations for the human operator and supports the use of immersive stereo devices. The developed concepts make also use of the fact that local robust autonomy components can be realized and thus can be incorporated as assistance systems for the human operators. A sliding autonomy concept is introduced combining force and visual augmented reality feedback. The force feedback component allows rendering the robot's current navigation intention to the human operator, such that a real sliding autonomy with seamless transitions is achieved. The user-studies prove the significant increase in navigation performance by application of this concept. The generic mixed reality user interface together with robust local autonomy enables a further extension of the teleoperation system to a short-term predictive mixed reality user interface. With the presented concept of operation, it is possible to significantly reduce the visibility of system delays for the human operator. In addition, both advantageous characteristics of a 3D graphical user interface for robot teleoperation- an exocentric view and an augmented reality view – can be combined.
This work deals with teams in teleoperation scenarios, where one human team partner (supervisor) guides and controls multiple remote entities (either robotic or human) and coordinates their tasks. Such a team needs an appropriate infrastructure for sharing information and commands. The robots need to have a level of autonomy, which matches the assigned task. The humans in the team have to be provided with autonomous support, e.g. for information integration. Design and capabilities of the human-robot interfaces will strongly influence the performance of the team as well as the subjective feeling of the human team partners. Here, it is important to elaborate the information demand as well as how information is presented. Such human-robot systems need to allow the supervisor to gain an understanding of what is going on in the remote environment (situation awareness) by providing the necessary information. This includes achieving fast assessment of the robot´s or remote human´s state. Processing, integration and organization of data as well as suitable autonomous functions support decision making and task allocation and help to decrease the workload in this multi-entity teleoperation task. Interaction between humans and robots is improved by a common world model and a responsive system and robots. The remote human profits from a simplified user interface providing exactly the information needed for the actual task at hand. The topic of this thesis is the investigation of such teleoperation interfaces in human-robot teams, especially for high-risk, time-critical, and dangerous tasks. The aim is to provide a suitable human-robot team structure as well as analyze the demands on the user interfaces. On one side, it will be looked on the theoretical background (model, interactions, and information demand). On the other side, real implementations for system, robots, and user interfaces are presented and evaluated as testbeds for the claimed requirements. Rescue operations, more precisely fire-fighting, was chosen as an exemplary application scenario for this work. The challenges in such scenarios are high (highly dynamic environments, high risk, time criticality etc.) and it can be expected that results can be transferred to other applications, which have less strict requirements. The present work contributes to the introduction of human-robot teams in task-oriented scenarios, such as working in high risk domains, e.g. fire-fighting. It covers the theoretical background of the required system, the analysis of related human factors concepts, as well as discussions on implementation. An emphasis is placed on user interfaces, their design, requirements and user testing, as well as on the used techniques (three-dimensional sensor data representation, mixed reality, and user interface design guidelines). Further, the potential integration of 3D sensor data as well as the visualization on stereo visualization systems is introduced.