An Interface for Remote Robotic Manipulator Control That Reduces Task Load and Fatigue

Abstract

Remote control robots are being found in an increasing number of application domains, including search and rescue, exploration, and reconnaissance. There is a large body of HRI research that investigates interface design for remote navigation, control, and sensor monitoring, while aiming for interface enhancements that benefit the remote operator such as improving ease of use, reducing operator mental load, and maximizing awareness of a robot's state and remote environment. Even though many remote control robots have multi-degree-of-freedom robotic manipulator arms for interacting with the environment, there is only limited research into easy-to-use remote control interfaces for such manipulators, and many commercial robotic products are still using simplistic interface technologies such as keypads or game pads with arbitrary mappings to arm morphology.

In this paper, we present an original interface for the remote control of a multi-degree of freedom robotic arm. We conducted a controlled experiment to compare our interface to an existing commercial keypad interface and detail our results that indicate our interface was easier to use, required less cognitive task load, and enabled people to complete tasks more quickly.

Video

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Citation

Ashish Singh, Stela H. Seo, Yasmeen Hashish, Masayuki Nakane, James E. Young, Andrea Bunt. An Interface for Remote Robotic Manipulator Control That Reduces Task Load and Fatigue. In proceedings of the IEEE international conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2013. RO-MAN'2013, to appear.

Bibtext Entry

@inproceedings{Singh2013,
author = {Singh, Ashish and Seo, Stela H. and Hashish, Yasmeen and Nakane, Masayuki and Young, James E. and Bunt, Andrea},
title = {An Interface for Remote Robotic Manipulator Control That Reduces Task Load and Fatigue},
booktitle = {IEEE international conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication},
series = {RO-MAN'2013},
year = {2013},
location = {Gyeongju, South Korea},
publisher = {IEEE Press},
pages = {to appear},
}