Man portable robots have been fielded extensively on the battlefield to enhance mission effectiveness of soldiers in dangerous conditions. The robots that have been deployed to date have been teleoperated. The development of assistive behaviors for these robots has the potential to alleviate the cognitive load placed on the robot operator. While full autonomy is the eventual goal, a range of assistive capabilities such as obstacle detection, obstacle avoidance, waypoint navigation, can be fielded sooner in a stand-alone fashion. These capabilities increase the level of autonomy on the robots so that the workload on the soldier can be reduced. The focus of this paper is on the design and execution of a series of scientifically rigorous experiments to quantifiably assess operator performance when operating a robot equipped with some of these assistive behaviors. The experiments helped to determine a baseline for teleoperation and to evaluate the benefit of Obstacle Detection and Obstacle Avoidance (OD/OA) vs. teleoperation and OD/OA with Open Space Planning (OSP) vs. teleoperation. The results of these experiments are presented and analyzed in the paper.

Date Published: 7 May 2010
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 7692, Unmanned Systems Technology XII, 76920P (7 May 2010); doi: 10.1117/12.850706

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7692:
Unmanned Systems Technology XII
Grant R. Gerhart; Douglas W. Gage; Charles M. Shoemaker, Editor(s)