Prova de Doutoramento da aluna Jéssica Gouveia Pereira Corujeira
Área: Engenharia Informática e de Computadores
Título da Tese: Augmentation of Situation Awareness Through Multimodal Interfaces in Mobile Robot Teleoperation
Local da Prova: https://videoconf-colibri.zoom.us/j/95705984185
Data: 07/06/2024
Hora: 14h00
Abstract: This thesis investigates the most significant human factors that impact situation awareness in mobile robot teleoperation. These are primarily caused by sensory deprivation while teleoperating the mobile robot in non-line-of-sight scenarios and emergency activities' complexity and multitasking requirements. These are usually exacerbated by the improper design of teleoperation interfaces. Furthermore, this thesis aims to improve the effectiveness of multimodal interfaces in mitigating loss of spatial awareness on mobile robot teleoperation, to increase situation awareness acquisition and lower cognitive overload for operators in emergency scenarios. First, by collecting and organizing guidelines and recommendations found in the scientific literature for teleoperation interface design, that can mitigate the challenges and negative factors impacting situation awareness and cognitive processes. These focus on facilitating operators' informational needs related to acquiring and maintaining situation awareness, while minimizing complexity and the need to interpret low-level data. Secondly, through the design, development and user study testing, in the laboratory and in the field, of haptic feedback systems and devices that mitigate collisions, help perceive the robot's spatial orientation, and improve perception and judgement of an opening's relative size to the robot. The results show that haptic feedback improved operators' navigational task completion time, shorter collision duration with walls, and a trend towards fewer collisions, compared to just visual information. From the observations and operators' reports of the field experiments, we observed that haptic feedback helped operators perceive the robot's spatial orientation and rate of change. Results also show that haptic feedback improves the perception and judgement of the size of openings, leading to a 6.4% average increase in correct judgement decisions over just visual information. These results led us to propose guidelines to include multimodal feedback in teleoperation interfaces, which we conclude helps improve operators' situation awareness and lowers the cognitive load.