Design and evaluation of an user interface for the coordination of a group of mobile robots

Abstract

Humans and robots can combine their complementary capabilities in joint teams. This requires appropriate support systems and related user interfaces. This paper presents an approach, how to organize and present information to support a human supervisor in coordinating a small group of mobile robots or a human-robot team. The user interface enables the human to keep track about the current status of the different entities, the overall mission and all important information already gathered at the current stage. The described experiment evaluates the presented approach and different information presentation methods (messages vs. autonomous updates) are compared.