Gaze-based Augmented Reality Interfaces to Support Scalable Human-Robot Teaming

摘要

As end users interact with increasing numbers of autonomous or semi-autonomous systems, collaboration and supervision become more complicated. People must simultaneously manage multiple systems, and most current interfaces do not scale. Augmented Reality (AR) offers a promising solution by placing information over the real world, allowing users to concurrently track the scene and robot(s) – potentially improving scaling for these devices. In this work, we leverage user gaze - a powerful indicator of attention suitable for reactive systems - to lower cognitive burden and improve performance such that scaling to multiple agents is possible. Gaze is probed in two modalities. In active mode, the user looks at a menu and presses a button to request additional information. The passive mode provides more information when the user’s gaze dwells on the menu. We performed two studies: 1) participants complete a visual search task with increasing numbers of virtual robotic agents and 2) participants must track the dynamic status of a team with physical agents. Results from the first study show that the passive and active interfaces provide better scaling compared to a non-interactive interface as the number of robots increases. In both studies, users preferred the passive mode, citing a lower mental demand, effort, and frustration.