Measuring Situational Awareness Latency in Human-Robot Teaming Experiments

Abstract

A human supervisor’s Situational Awareness (SA) is a critical aspect for successful Human-Robot Teaming (HRT). SA has been estimated using different techniques; however, many of those are associated with various biases, including recall and overgeneralisation biases. A key SA metric is latency, the delay between the time the robotic system requires supervisor assistance and the time the supervisor identifies that need in HRT experiments. Eye movements are increasingly used to assess SA across a range of domains, enabling objective and continuous SA assessment. However, to date, only a small number of features have been evaluated for estimating different types of SA latencies. In this paper, we investigated how two types of SA latencies (perceptual and comprehending) correlate with eye movement data collected during a remote field experiment, where a human supervisor directed a team of robots in a smart farming context. We identified 39 instances of SA latencies (13 perceptual and 26 comprehending). These instances were used to identify how a human supervisor’s SA is affected by task context, and to evaluate correlations between five eye movement features and SA latencies. Two eye movement features related to fixation duration and saccade duration demonstrated very strong correlations ($r \approx - 0.8$ and $r \approx 0.85$). Our findings can be extended to estimate the real-time likelihood of the human experiencing SA latency.