"Where am I?" Acquiring situation awareness using a remote robot platform

Human-robot interaction with urban search and rescue (USAR) robots needs to provide operators with a means of maintaining situation awareness (SA), especially since the USAR operators usually cannot see the robots that they are directing. We used a technique from human-computer interaction known as usability testing, plus implicit and explicit SA measurement techniques, to investigate USAR operators' levels of SA and strategies for maintaining SA. We found that operators developed different SA strategies, spent an average of 30% of their time solely in SA activities, had less SA of the space behind the robot than in front or on the sides, did not use automatically-generated maps to gain SA, and had difficulty maintaining SA when in the autonomous mode.