Virtual Shadow Rendering for Maintaining Situation Awareness in Proximal Human-Robot Teaming

Abstract

One focus of augmented reality (AR) in robotics has been on enriching the interface for human-robot interaction. While such an interface is often made intuitive to interact with, it invariably imposes novel objects into the environment. In situations where the human already has a focus, such as in a human-robot teaming task, these objects can potentially overload our senses and lead to degraded teaming performance. In this paper, we propose using AR objects to solely augment natural objects to avoid disrupting our natural senses while adding critical information about the current situation. In particular, our case study focuses on addressing the limited field of view of humans by incorporating persistent virtual shadows of robots for maintaining situation awareness in proximal human-robot teaming tasks.