Evaluation of Human Factors for Assessing Human-Robot Interaction in Delayed Teleoperation

In space missions, the interaction of human operators and telerobotic systems facilitates complex exploration and manipulation tasks but is substantially affected by inevitable time delays. The efficiency and effectiveness of the human-robot interaction strongly depends on several not immediately obvious human factors. The actual degree of influence and possible interactions among these human factors are still subject of ongoing research. This paper presents the results of the dHRI Expert Survey which aimed at a systematic evaluation of relevant human factors for teleoperation scenarios with critical time delays. The survey focused on different aspects of situational awareness, user workload and user experience for an example scenario with a teleoperated robotic system on the Moon and a human operator on Earth. Twenty-eight international experts in human-robot interaction, robotics and engineering participated in the survey. The results provide a valuable indication of significance for the regarded factors with understanding, performance and dependability being rated as most important. Even there are commonly accepted definitions, large deviations in the ratings for some factors and additional comments by some experts suggest that there still might be an ambiguity in the use of terms.