An Operator and Observer Style Teleoperation User Interface for Remote Object Search

The advancement of robotics has created situations where the robot assists the human operator. How to interact between the human operators and robots is essential for the assistant. They have different specialty fields, and they should play each role. In this paper, we focus on the "operator and observer control style" teleoperation user interface based on the interaction between the autonomous robot (operator) and the human (observer). For example, the human observer will view the workspace from a broad perspective, expedite the flow of work, send commands, or advise the robots, whether industry or on a farm. We developed a semi-autonomous teleoperation system for remote object searches that can assist in the search using an omnidirectional camera. The proposed system can prevent task failure due to erroneous recognition of the object by advice given even when grasping the object. To verify the proposed style, we chose a bring-me task, in which the robot searches for and fetches a specified object from several objects in a room in an indoor environment. We conducted a subjective experiment with four conditions (two camera conditions x two operational conditions) and evaluated the usability of the SUS and execution time of the system with fourteen participants. The result indicated that our teleoperation user interface is more usable than the directly controlled teleoperation style commonly used.