"Turn Off the Television!": Real-World Robotic Exploration Experiments with a Virtual 3-D Display

In order to apply mobile robots to a new range of applications, we require control architectures and interfaces that support symbiotic interaction. Remote deployment of mobile robots offers one of the most compelling opportunities to merge human intelligence with machine proficiency. This paper discusses a mixed-initiative control strategy based not on video, but on an abstracted, collaborative workspace - a 3-D, video-game representation constructed on-the-fly - that promotes situation-awareness and efficient tasking. The new interface requires orders of magnitude less bandwidth than teleoperation and permits transmission ranges of thousands of miles. Unlike video, which offers only a first person, local environment perspective, the 3-D interface changes perspective to support changing levels of operator involvement and robot autonomy. The human-participant study presented here evaluates the effectiveness of this interaction substrate on a remote exploration task. Results indicate that this new tool for interfacing humans and intelligent robots can reduce communication bandwidth and human error, increase operators' subjective "feeling of control", and enable a spectrum of remote robotic applications which have never before been possible.