Perception of Robot Passability and Aperture Width during Direct Line of Sight and Teleoperation Conditions

Abstract

The current experiment examined the ability of participants to judge the passability of a robot through an aperture and to reproduce the width of the aperture in both Direct Line of Sight (DLS) and Teleoperation (TO) conditions. Previous research performed in our laboratory has shown that participants overestimate robot passability in teleoperation conditions (i.e. they state that the robot can pass when it cannot). The current study aimed to replicate past findings as well as to determine the cause of overestimation during TO. Twelve Clemson University undergraduate students participated in both the DLS and TO conditions. Similar to previous research, participants judged smaller apertures as passable in the TO condition compared to the DLS condition. Results showed that participants' reproductions of aperture sizes were overestimated, which likely leads to the overestimation of robot passability during TO. Participant estimations of aperture size and judgments of robot passability help to quantify the differences between direct line of sight and teleoperation conditions and these results will be useful in the training of operators for future teleoperation tasks.

References

Casper

Murphy

R. R.

(2003). Human-robot interactions during the robot-assisted urban search and rescue response at the world trade center. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics - Part B: Cybernetics, 33, 367 385.

Moore

K.S.

Pagano

C.C.

(2006). Can Humans Perceive Affordances for Teleoperated Robots? Poster presented at the North American Meeting of the International Society for Ecological Psychology, Cincinnati, OH, June 22–24, 2006.

Tittle

J.S.

Roesler

Woods

D.D.

(2002). The remote perception problem. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics society 46th annual meeting, 260–264.

Warren

W.S.

Whang

(1987). Visual guidance of walking through apertures: Body-scaled information for affordances. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 13(3), 371 383.

Woods

D.D.

Tittle

Feil

Roesler

(2004). Envisioning human-robot coordination in future operations. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics – Part C: Applications and Reviews, 34(2), 210 218.