AUTHOR=Butters Daniel , Jonasson Emil T. , Pawar Vijay M. 

TITLE=Exploring Effects of Information Filtering With a VR Interface for Multi-Robot Supervision

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Robotics and AI

VOLUME=Volume 8 - 2021

YEAR=2021

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/robotics-and-ai/articles/10.3389/frobt.2021.692180

DOI=10.3389/frobt.2021.692180

ISSN=2296-9144

ABSTRACT=Supervising and controlling remote robot systems currently requires many specialised operatorsto  have  knowledge  of  the  internal  state  of  the  system  in  addition  to  the  environment.  Forapplications  such as  remote maintenance  of  future nuclear  fusion  reactors,  the  number ofrobots (and hence supervisors) required to maintain or decommission a facility is too large tobe financially feasible. To address this issue, this work explores the idea of intelligently filteringinformation so that a single user can supervise multiple robots safely. We gathered feedbackfrom participants using five methods for teleoperating a semi-autonomous multi-robot system viaVirtual Reality (VR). We present a novel 3D interaction method to filter the displayed information toallow the user to read information from the environment without being overwhelmed. The noveltyof the interface design is the link between Semantic and Spatial filtering and the hierarchicalinformation contained within the multi robot system. We conducted a user study including a cohortof expert robot teleoperators comparing these methods; highlighting the significant effects of 3Dinterface design on the performance and perceived workload of a user teleoperating many robotagents in complex environments. The results from this experiment and subjective user feedbackwill inform future investigations that build upon this initial work.