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Rapid advancements in Artificial Intelligence have shifted the focus from traditional human-directed robots to fully autonomous ones that do not require explicit human control. These are commonly referred to as Human-on-the-Loop (HotL) systems. Transparency of HotL systems necessitates clear explanations of autonomous behavior so that humans are aware of what is happening in the environment and can understand why robots behave in a certain way. However, in complex multi-robot environments, especially those in which the robots are autonomous and mobile, humans may struggle to maintain situational awareness. Presenting humans with rich explanations of autonomous behavior tends to overload them with lots of information and negatively affect their understanding of the situation. Therefore, explaining the autonomous behavior of multiple robots creates a design tension that demands careful investigation. This paper examines the User Interface (UI) design trade-offs associated with providing timely and detailed explanations of autonomous behavior for swarms of small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) or drones. We analyze the impact of UI design choices on human awareness of the situation. We conducted multiple user studies with both inexperienced and expert sUAS operators to present our design solution and initial guidelines for designing the HotL multi-sUAS interface.
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Autonomous Visual Assistance for Robot Operations Using a Tethered UAV
This paper develops an autonomous tethered aerial visual assistant for robot operations in unstructured or confined environments. Robotic tele-operation in remote environments is difficult due to the lack of sufficient situational awareness, mostly caused by stationary and limited field-of-view and lack of depth perception from the robot’s onboard camera. The emerging state of the practice is to use two robots, a primary and a secondary that acts as a visual assistant to overcome the perceptual limitations of the onboard sensors by providing an external viewpoint. However, problems exist when using a tele-operated visual assistant: extra manpower, manually chosen suboptimal viewpoint, and extra teamwork demand between primary and secondary operators. In this work, we use an autonomous tethered aerial visual assistant to replace the secondary robot and operator, reducing the human-robot ratio from 2:2 to 1:2. This visual assistant is able to autonomously navigate through unstructured or confined spaces in a risk-aware manner, while continuously maintaining good viewpoint quality to increase the primary operator’s situational awareness. With the proposed co-robots team, tele-operation missions in nuclear operations, bomb squad, disaster robots, and other domains with novel tasks or highly occluded environments could benefit from reduced manpower and teamwork demand, along with improved visual assistance quality based on trustworthy risk-aware motion in cluttered environments.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1945105
- PAR ID:
- 10313426
- Editor(s):
- Ishigami G., Yoshida K.
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Field and Service Robotics. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics
- Volume:
- 16
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-9460-1_2
