In Search of a Good Title » Visualizations

Visualization for Effectively Co-located GIS Map Items

Curtis M. Humphrey — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 21:21:56 +0000

One of my summer project (2009) is to supervisor someone for awhile on a projected I designed. This year’s project is entited “Visualization for Effectively Co-located GIS Map Items” (title did take a while to invent). The official project paragraph is below along with a mockup of the idea we are implimenting.

“When information is sent from robots or remote sensors to a computer interface that representing the information as items on a geographic information system (GIS) map, the items can often be effectively co-located. Items effectively co-located present a visual issue because the items visually overlap to the point that only one item is truly visible. The long-term objective of the Effectively Co-located GIS Map Items project is to develop graceful and useful methods to visually display these items. This particular project will focus on identifying when items are effectively co-located and then developing and implementing one or more methods to visually present these items.”

Visualization mockup depicting an "stack" of items and the corrisponding "unstacking" visualization.

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

Visualization of Multiple Robots During Team Activities

Curtis M. Humphrey — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:52:23 +0000

Team Visualization Interface

As robotic systems encompass larger numbers of individual robotic agents, interface design must provide better visual representations that account for factors affecting situational awareness. This project investigated different robotic team visualizations that varied in how much information was displayed: only individual robots, individual robots connected via a semitransparent team shape, and a solid team shape. The evaluation results revealed that the two visualizations that utilized a team shape were strongly preferred over the visualization that displayed only individual robots.

Related Papers:

Humphrey, C. M., Gordon, S. M., & Adams, J. A. (2006). Visualization of Multiple Robots During Team Activities. In Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting Proceedings (Vol. 50, pp. 651-655).

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.

Addressing Information Sharing in Directable Interfaces via DIARE Concept

Curtis M. Humphrey — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:19:52 +0000

DIARE Concept Snapshot

Decision Information Abstracted to a Relevant Encapsulation (DIARE) is based on the idea that evidence for a particular decision can be represented as a defined volume in the visualization’s information space spanning six components [x, y, e, t, s, m]. This defined volume becomes an object, or DIARE object, and contains information relating to that particular decision (i.e. range ofm) in terms of a spatial area (i.e. range of x, y, and e), time range (t), and detail range (v). A DIARE object acts as a super information object that can be shared between user levels and can itself become an element in the visualization. For example, several DIARE objects can be created by the person supervising the robots during an area survey, and later, someone else can search an overlapping area for any DIARE objects that deal with unusual items, which can cause the visualization to display one or two DIARE objects as information items on the map.

The evaluation participants generally stated that the DIARE concept’s strengths were its ability to provide: a quick visual event history overview (i.e., the timeline of DIARE objects), a quick mechanism to recall and replay important events (i.e., the ability to click on a DIARE object to recall that moment), and several useful elements when displaying a DIARE object (e.g., the DIARE object’s snapshot, information tags). These findings support the hypothesis that the DIARE concepts will facilitate information sharing across both time and users.

View of DIARE Concept in the Emergency Responses Interface as sceen in the user evaluations.

Related Papers:

Humphrey, C. M., & Adams, J. A. (2009). Addressing Information Sharing in Directable Interfaces via DIARE Concept. Manuscript in preparation.

General Visualization Abstraction Algorithm for Geographic Map-Based Directable Interfaces

Curtis M. Humphrey — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:12:53 +0000

A screenshot of a directable interface visualization powered by the GVA algorithm in action.

Emergency incident response is evolving from a response involving humans with equipment to a response system combining humans and thinking machines (e.g. robots). The robots and other sensors will generate and capture volumes of information that will be presented in geographic map-based directable visualizations. This project involved presented a novel approach to performing information abstraction (i.e., selection and grouping) and determining how each information item should be presented (i.e., its shape) in direct-able visualizations for the emergency incident response. This new approach employs the General Visualization Abstraction (GVA) algorithm to make salient and direct attention to the most relevant information items by determining an importance value for each information item based on the item’s relationship with two classes of information: historically and currently relevant information, and novel and emerging information.

The evaluation results were statistically supportive, indicating that, in most cases, the GVA algorithm improved performance, lowered workload, and increased situational awareness. The implication to interface visualizations from these results is that the general approach behind the GVA algorithm (i.e., the grouping, filtering, and displaying of an information item based on an evaluation of its historical and currently relevant and novel and emerging properties) is not only possible but advantageous in directable visualizations.

Related Papers:

Humphrey, C. M., & Adams, J. A. (2009). General Visualization Abstraction Algorithm for Geographic Map-Based Human-Robot Interfaces. In Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE international conference on Human robot interaction (pp. 289-290). La Jolla, California, USA: ACM. doi: 10.1145/1514095.1514180.

Humphrey, C. M., & Adams, J. A. (2009). General Visualization Abstraction Algorithm for Geographic Map-Based Directable Interfaces: Results. Manuscript in preparation.