Gravity-Referenced Attitude Display for Mobile Robots: Making Sense of What We See

Attitude control refers to controlling the pitch and roll of a mobile robot. As environments become more complex and cues to a robot's pose become sparser, it becomes easy for a teleoperator using an egocentric (camera) display to lose situational awareness. Reported difficulties with teleoperated robots frequently involve rollovers and sometimes even failure to realize that a robot has rolled over. Attitude information has conventionally been displayed separately from the camera view using an artificial horizon graphic or individual indicators for pitch and roll. Information from separate attitude displays may be difficult to integrate with an ongoing navigation task and may lead to errors. In this paper, we report an experiment in which a simulated robot is maneuvered over rough exterior and interior terrains to compare a gravity-referenced view with a separated attitude indication. Results show shorter task times and better path choices for users of the gravity-referenced view but no reduction in rollovers