SATOP- Situation Awareness during Teleoperation

• Applicant: Professorin Dr.-Ing. Verena Nitsch
• Subject Area: Human Factors, Ergonomics, Human-Machine Systems
• Term: since 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 272130626

Teleoperation, i.e. the remote control of technical systems by humans, is particularly important for non-standardized tasks. Tele-navigation (TN) and tele-manipulation (TM) are considered to be the two largest areas of application for teleoperation. In the first two phases of the project, the role of situational awareness (SA) and multimodal directional cues in the successful TN of a rover in simulated environments was investigated. Building on this research, the third phase of the project will investigate the role of SA during TM tasks in order to derive insights for the design of TM systems. While the flexibility of TM systems is essential for processing non-standardized tasks, it also increases task complexity in a way that makes it difficult for humans to maintain adequate SA ("complexity creep"). Here there is the possibility to use various cues in order to support the user in acquiring and maintaining SA. The third phase of the project will therefore investigate whether grasping cues and gesture control can support TM tasks by activating the user's conceptual knowledge about the interaction with the corresponding object. In order to derive design guidelines for user interface solutions to promote the emergence and maintenance of adequate SA, the following three overarching goals will be pursued in the third project phase: (1) understanding the role of SA for successful object TM, (2) implementing and validating an objective implicit measure of SA, and (3) investigating the effects of grasp cue stimuli as well as grasp gesture control on SA and task performance. To this end, four experiments are planned in which a two-armed telerobot and a one-armed telerobot with interchangeable end-effectors will be investigated in two scenarios. The first scenario, a general object TM scenario, consists of grasping multiple objects with the robotic system and will be investigated in the first two experiments. The second, teleoperated maintenance scenario, consists of replacing a broken light bulb and will be investigated in two further experiments. Explicit and implicit measurements of SA are collected together with measurements of participants' TM performance. In the four experiments, the effects of grasping cues superimposed onto the object and the effects of grasping gesture control are investigated. The findings derived from the results are summarized and documented in the HMI design guide.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants