A Usage-Centered Evaluation Methodology for Unmanned Ground Vehicles

Abstract

This paper presents a usage-centered evaluation method to assess the capabilities of a particular Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) for establishing the operational goals. The method includes a test battery consisting of basic tasks (e.g., slalom, funnel driving, object detection). Tests can be of different levels of abstraction, and be performed in a virtual or real environment. In this way, several candidate UGV’s in a procurement program can be assessed, and thus compared. Also, it can give directions to research on improving human-robot interfaces. A first case study of this methodology conveyed capability differences of two alternative user interfaces for a specific UGV with their operational impact.