You Have Time to Explore Over Here!: Augmented Reality for Enhanced Situation Awareness in Human-Robot Collaborative Exploration

Terran Mott, Thomas Williams, Hao Zhang, Christopher Reardon

Keywords: Human-robot interaction, human-robot teaming, augmented reality, Situation Awareness

TL;DR: This paper describes the design of augmented reality visualizations for simulated human-robot collaborative search, as well as the results of a user study in which participants watched videos of the simulated task.

Abstract: Augmented Reality (AR) is a promising mode of communication for human-robot teaming, due in part to its ability to increase Situation Awareness. In this work, we specifically consider the role of AR in enabling Situation Awareness in time-dominant collaborative human-robot exploration tasks. We present a crowdsourced evaluation of a set of AR visualizations in a simulated version of such a task, and measure the Situation Awareness of experiment participants. Our results raise key questions about the efficacy of Situation Awareness measurement in observational (rather than interactive) evaluation contexts.

Track: full paper

Broader Impacts: Augmented reality is a promising tool for human-robot teaming in collaborative search tasks. Potential domains where this is the case, like search and rescue and disaster response, often involve high-stakes scenarios with the possibility of serious consequences for errors. Human-robot augmented reality communication that omits or misrepresents task-critical information could lead to serious mistakes on the part of human teammates. For this reason, it is important to carefully consider the design and delivery of such communication.