In Search of a Good Title » Human-Robot Interaction

Ph.D. Thesis: Information Abstraction Visualization for Human-Robot Interaction

Curtis M. Humphrey — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 22:08:52 +0000

Vanderbilt School of Engineering

Future emergency incident responses, including Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and Explosive (CBRNE), will incorporate robots. The ability to interact with robots and understand the resulting volumes of information requires a system of human-robot interfaces employing directable visualizations that provide information immediacy, relevancy, and sharing appropriate for each human’s responsibilities.
This dissertation conducted two modified Cognitive Tasks Analyses (CTA) on the CBRNE incident response. The Cognitive Information Flow Analysis (CIFA) was developed to combine CTA results and to analyze the path of information as it passes through and is transformed by the system at different human-robot interaction (HRI) user levels. These analyses (i.e., modified CTAs and CIFA) collectively informed the HRI design and development.

The primary contributions of this dissertation are the development and evaluation of two novel visualization techniques that present immediate, relevant, and shared information provided by the robots to the human users in the system of human-robot interfaces. The General Visualization Abstraction (GVA) algorithm, the first technique, is designed to provide information immediacy and relevancy by displaying the most useful information at any given moment determined by rewarding information that is either historically and currently relevant or novel and emerging. The Decision Information Abstracted to a Relevant Encapsulation (DIARE) concept, the second technique, supports decision-making by representing prior event information as a defined volume in the visualization’s information space and encapsulates the volume into an explicit and visual object that can be shared across time and users.

User evaluations were conducted for both visualization techniques. The GVA algorithm’s evaluation results indicate that it can reduce cognitive workload, increase situational awareness, and improve performance for two different HRI user levels. The DIARE concept results indicate that participants were able to rapidly ascertain what had happened previously with great accuracy and good memory recall. Together, these two visualization techniques can assist decision-makers using directable visualizations, such as those used in HRI, by offering an effective method of sharing and providing real-time, relevant information.

Related Papers:

Curtis M. Humphrey. Information Abstraction Visualization for Human-Robot Interaction. PhD thesis,Vanderbilt University, August 2009

Designing a System of User Interfaces for Controlling Robots for Emergency Incident Response

Curtis M. Humphrey — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 21:52:23 +0000

System of User Interfaces

The emergency response incidents (e.g., Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and Explosive (CBRNE) incidents or weapons of mass destruction) are evolving from a response involving humans (e.g. first responders, government officials, civilians) with equipment (e.g. protective suits, vehicles, sensors) to a response system combining humans and thinking machines (e.g. robots, information technology). The difference between equipment (e.g. fire engines, radios, maps) and thinking machines (e.g. robots, computerized decision support systems) is that machines incorporate some cognitive abilities. If the emergency response system is to take effective advantage of emerging technology, the response activity needs to be understood in a way that facilitates the incorporation of these thinking machines and the development of effective human machine interactions. The incorporation of new thinking machines into the emergency response system is resulting in a shift, abet slowly, to a new paradigm.

The long-term objective is to design and develop a system of robots and associated human-robot interfaces (HRI) appropriate technology for all responders throughout the human response command hierarchy by first understanding the human activities, rather than starting with the technology design and then evaluating its effectiveness after development.

Remote Operator Interface an Operator/Supervisor Interaction Role

Operations Chief Interface an Abstract Supervisor

Multiple Robot Interfaces Scalability and the Halo Concept

Curtis M. Humphrey — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:50:11 +0000

Robot Interface Scaliablity and Halo Concept

As multiple robot systems become more common, it is necessary to develop scalable human-robot interfaces that permit the inclusion of additional robots without reducing the overall system performance. This project focused on the development of a scalable interface for a single human-to-multiple robot system with the intention to promote situation awareness and the management of multiple robots by combining the two types of displays. This project also explored a relational “halo” display that augments a camera view to promote situational awareness (SA) and the management of multiple robots by providing information regarding the robots’ relative locations with respect to a selected robot.

A user evaluation was conducted to determine the scalability of the interface focusing on the effects of increasing the number of robots on workload, situation awareness, and robot usage. The evaluation results indicate that the interface scales better than hypothesized. The evaluation highlights a tradeoff between workload and SA, as the number of robots increased so did the workload and SA, a result that contradicts prior research results. The increased workload was significantly lower than hypothesized while the increase in SA was contradictory to the hypothesis. The increase in SA indicates that developing interfaces that support larger numbers of robots may result in increased SA; however further analysis is required to ensure that these results are not due to limitations associated with the 3D SART tool.

Related Papers:

Humphrey, C. M., Henk, C., Sewell, G., Williams, B. W., & Adams, J. A. (2007). Assessing the scalability of a multiple robot interface. In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction (pp. 239-246). Arlington, Virginia, USA: ACM. doi: 10.1145/1228716.1228749.

Compass Visualizations for Human-Robotic Interaction

Curtis M. Humphrey — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:46:21 +0000

3D Compass Visualization

This project compared two representative compass visualizations: top-down and in-world world-aligned to ascertain which one provided better metric judgment accuracy, lowers workload, provides better situational awareness, is perceived as easier to use, and is preferred. The evaluation results are in agreement with existing results regarding the effects of 2D and 3D views on the operators’ ability to complete different tasks. The implication to human-robotic interaction from these results is that the choice in compass visualizations has a definite and non-trivial impact. In general, the world-aligned compass resulted in faster task performance; whereas, the top-down compass provided perceived situational awareness and was perceived easier to use. Our results imply that a top-down compass visualization is appropriate for metric judgment tasks and an in-world compass visualization is appropriate for navigational tasks. A single compass visualization may be inappropriate for all HRI tasks, specifically tasks that combine metric judgment and navigational activities into a single task. Compass visualizations for these combined tasks require further evaluation.

Compass Visualization Interface displaying the 2D Compass

Related Papers:

Humphrey, C. M., & Adams, J. A. Compass visualizations for human-robotic interaction. In HRI ’08: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Human robot interaction, pages 49-56, New York, NY, USA, 2008.

Emergency Response System Human-Robot Interaction User Levels

Curtis M. Humphrey — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:37:36 +0000

Emergency Response System Human-Robot Interaction User Levels

This project formulated how the large numbers of individuals that can be involved in an emergency response event can be encapsulated into ten different Emergency Response System Human-Robot Interaction User Levels that represent the various manners in which responders will interact with future robotic systems. The ten user levels were informed by existing HRI roles, domain relevant documents, subject matter expert interviews, and GDTA and CWA results. This project also originated a new human-robot interaction role: the abstract supervisor role.

Related Papers:

Humphrey, C. M., & Adams, J. A. (2009). CBRNE User Levels: Introducing the Abstract Supervisor Human-Robot Interaction Role and Case Study. Manuscript in preparation.