Interface Evaluation for Mobile Robot Teleoperation

摘要

Controlling mobile robots through teleoperation is a challenging task that demands a flexible and efficient user interface. Mobile robots are often equipped with numerous sensors (proximity sensors, system status sensors, positioning and heading devices, multiple cameras, etc.) that provide a high volume of data to the user. Because the amount of data is vastly larger than what can fit on the screen, and because the needed subset of data can change rapidly and unpredictably depending on events in the robot's environment, modern teleoperation interfaces often display user-selected data with a windowing paradigm that facilitates quick display modification. In this paper, we examine the possibility that too much fine-grained control over window positioning and sizing could hamper user performance by interfering with display modification. To test our hypothesis, three humancomputer interfaces for a mobile robot were designed and then evaluated through performance studies consisting of 12 expert and 24 novice participants. The first two interface designs followed the standard Microsoft Windows graphical user interface design paradigm and provided participants with fine-grained control over the position and sizing of sensor displays. The third interface was designed using principles from cockpit and humanfactors research, and provided participants with limited control over display position and sizing. User performance for each interface was assessed on a display reconfiguration task consisting of adding, removing, positioning, and resizing sensor data windows, a common task in robot navigation and situational assessment. In general, expert participants preferred the interface with limited control over position and sizing, while novice participants preferred the more tradition...