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1. Design and Evaluation of Human-Centered Visualization Interfaces in Construction Teleoperation

   https://doi.org/10.1061/9780784485262  

   Chae, Yeon; Gupta, Samraat; Ham, Youngjib (March 2024, American Society of Civil Engineers)

   Shane, Jennifer S; Madson, Katherine M; Mo, Yunjeong Leah; Poleacovschi, Cristina; Sturgill, Roy E (Ed.)

   Teleoperation is widely used in hazardous and uncertain site settings, allowing scheduled procedures to be carried out across long distances while workers are away from the sites. Teleoperators in off-sites collect both the site information and feedback from the interfaces which provide synthesized information that a robot collects. This interface mainly conveys visionary information for the operator’s intuitiveness such as the spatial awareness of objects and surroundings. To achieve a rich visual understanding of the site, the interface should fully contain and intuitively convey the associated contextual information. Excessive or unintuitive information not only makes it difficult for operators to exert their full potential but also increases their cognitive load. This study explores how different visual interface configurations affect operators’ work performance and their cognitive load during the teleoperation task. The findings from the experimental studies are expected to help develop human-centered interfaces for teleoperation in the context of construction tasks and provide the cornerstone for not only an intuitive but fruitfully informative interface in a provided task setting. 

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2. The effect of challenging work environment on human-robot interaction and cognitive load during teleoperation: a case study of teleoperated excavator in a virtual experiment

   https://doi.org/10.22260/ICRA2022/0017  

   Lee, Jin Sol; Ham, Youngjib (May 2022, The 2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA))

   Construction sites typically involve a risky, dynamic, and challenging work environment. Despite numerous safety training programs and regulations, accidents still occur in construction sites, especially when working with construction robotics. To alleviate this problem in the most fundamental way, teleoperation that allows operators to work remotely has been studied. Teleoperated construction robots have the great potential to be used in various contexts for extreme and hazardous construction sites. Here, work conditions for human-robot interaction in construction differ from those in other structured and controlled environments like manufacturing factories, and thus there is a need for the associated studies. In this paper, we aim to measure and analyze the performance of human-robot interaction and the cognitive load of human operators in dynamic and challenging construction work environments (hazardous risks such as underground utility strikes and working under time constraints). 

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3. Intuitive, Efficient and Ergonomic Tele-Nursing Robot Interfaces: Design Evaluation and Evolution

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3526108  

   Lin, Tsung-Chi; Krishnan, Achyuthan Unni; Li, Zhi (April 2022, ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction)

   Tele-nursing robots provide a safe approach for patient-caring in quarantine areas. For effective nurse-robot collaboration, ergonomic teleoperation and intuitive interfaces with low physical and cognitive workload must be developed. We propose a framework to evaluate the control interfaces to iteratively develop an intuitive, efficient, and ergonomic teleoperation interface. The framework is a hierarchical procedure that incorporates general to specific assessment and its role in design evolution. We first present pre-defined objective and subjective metrics used to evaluate three representative contemporary teleoperation interfaces. The results indicate that teleoperation via human motion mapping outperforms the gamepad and stylus interfaces. The trade-off with using motion mapping as a teleoperation interface is the non-trivial physical fatigue. To understand the impact of heavy physical demand during motion mapping teleoperation, we propose an objective assessment of physical workload in teleoperation using electromyography (EMG). We find that physical fatigue happens in the actions that involve precise manipulation and steady posture maintenance. We further implemented teleoperation assistance in the form of shared autonomy to eliminate the fatigue-causing component in robot teleoperation via motion mapping. The experimental results show that the autonomous feature effectively reduces the physical effort while improving the efficiency and accuracy of the teleoperation interface. 

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4. Reality Capture Technologies (LiDAR, RGB-D, Vision)

   https://doi.org/10.1061/9780784482438.019  

   Liang, Ci-Jyun; Lundeen, Kurt M.; McGee, Wes; Menassa, Carol C.; Lee, SangHyun; Kamat, Vineet R. (June 2019, Fast Dataset Collection Approach for Articulated Equipment Pose Estimation)

   Struck-by accidents are potential safety concerns on construction sites and require a robust machine pose estimation. The development of deep learning methods has enhanced the human pose estimation that can be adapted for articulated machines. These methods require abundant dataset for training, which is challenging and time-consuming to obtain on-site. This paper proposes a fast data collection approach to build the dataset for excavator pose estimation. It uses two industrial robot arms as the excavator and the camera monopod to collect different excavator pose data. The 3D annotation can be obtained from the robot's embedded encoders. The 2D pose is annotated manually. For evaluation, 2,500 pose images were collected and trained with the stacked hourglass network. The results showed that the dataset is suitable for the excavator pose estimation network training in a controlled environment, which leads to the potential of the dataset augmenting with real construction site images. 

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5. Perception and Action Augmentation for Teleoperation Assistance in Freeform Telemanipulation

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3643804  

   Lin, Tsung-Chi; Krishnan, Achyuthan Unni; Li, Zhi (March 2024, ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction)

   Teleoperation enables controlling complex robot systems remotely, providing the ability to impart human expertise from a distance. However, these interfaces can be complicated to use as it is difficult to contextualize information about robot motion in the workspace from the limited camera feedback. Thus, it is required to study the best manner in which assistance can be provided to the operator that reduces interface complexity and effort required for teleoperation. Some techniques that provide assistance to the operator while freeform teleoperating include: (1) perception augmentation, like augmented reality visual cues and additional camera angles, increasing the information available to the operator; (2) action augmentation, like assistive autonomy and control augmentation, optimized to reduce the effort required by the operator while teleoperating. In this article, we investigate: (1) which aspects of dexterous telemanipulation require assistance; (2) the impact of perception and action augmentation in improving teleoperation performance; and (3) what factors impact the usage of assistance and how to tailor these interfaces based on the operators’ needs and characteristics. The findings from this user study and resulting post-study surveys will help identify task-based and user-preferred perception and augmentation features for teleoperation assistance. 

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