Tele-Presence: Bringing the operator back in the loop

The importance of uninhabited vehicles in military environments has been recognised for many years. Much progress has been made in fields such as robotics and data communications, but not so much on the human factors issues. This is partly due to the trend to strive for ever higher levels of system autonomy, leaving the operator the task of supervising the system. However, by increasing system automation, the cognitive system of operators may become a bottleneck. A recent concept (which we call tele-presence) to tackle this problem is to design man-machine interfaces that allow operators to optimally use their perceptual motor system in order to relieve the cognitive system. Such an interface would enable sheer effortless looking and moving around in the remote environment by bringing the operator back in the front of the loop, resulting in a redistribution of task demands from the cognitive level to the perceptual level. A successful implementation would result in increased situational awareness and reduced cognitive load. This paper starts with describing the theoretical background behind tele-presence concept among others based on EndsleyAEs Situational Awareness model. In the second part, we describe the design of a telepresence interface for controlling an unmanned ground vehicle and an initial, exploratory study. The findings of this experiment show that we were not able to elicit a robust tele-presence effect yet. We discuss the results in relation to the present state of technology, interface characteristics such as delay between input and feedback, behaviour and motion sickness, and make recommendations on future research directions.