There's More than Meets the Eye: Enhancing Robot Control through Augmented Visual Cues

In this paper, we present the design of a visual feedback mechanism using Augmented Reality, which we call augmented visual cues, to assist pick-and-place tasks during robot control. We propose to augment the robot operator's visual space in order to avoid attention splitting and increase situational awareness (SA). In particular, we aim to improve on the SA concepts of perception, comprehension, and projection as well as the overall task performance. For that, we built upon the interaction design paradigm proposed by Walker et al.. On the one hand, our design augments the robot to support picking-tasks; and, on the other hand, we augment the environment to support placing-tasks. We evaluated our design in a first user study, and results point to specific design aspects that need improvement while showing promise for the overall approach, in particular regarding user satisfaction and certain SA concepts.