Now you’re teleoperating with power: learning from video games to improve teleoperation interfaces

摘要

Teleoperation has potential applications in the home, industry, and other areas such as search and rescue. Safe and efficient teleoperation is difficult, however, and improved interaction design is one way to mitigate the challenges operators encounter. Video games share many similar challenges to teleoperation in terms of interaction design: both have a user controlling an entity in a remote space, receiving feedback and sending controls. I investigate how to improve teleoperation performance and experience by learning from video game interaction design. For years, video game developers have been creating interactions in their games (e.g., in game events, interface elements, and characters) that influence how their players think and act by leveraging different aspects of human psychology. I investigate how I can take design cues and inspiration from these psychology-based video game interaction to design, implement, and evaluate new interaction designs that consider or shape how operators think and act during teleoperation. I successfully design and experimentally evaluate a concrete set of video game-inspired teleoperation techniques from three perspectives: directing operator attention, priming operator perceptions of robot capability to shape driving behaviour, and using social agents to influence operator experience and driving behaviour. In addition, I create a framework of video game interaction design; my framework provides the structure and vocabulary for discussing video game interactions at an abstract level, which I leverage to showcase the similarities of the problem spaces, and solutions.