Exploring Interaction with Remote Autonomous Systems using Conversational Agents

Autonomous vehicles and robots are increasingly being deployed to remote, dangerous environments in the energy sector, search and rescue and the military. As a result, there is a need for humans to interact with these robots to monitor their tasks, such as inspecting and repairing offshore wind-turbines. Conversational Agents can improve situation awareness and transparency, while being a hands-free medium to communicate key information quickly and succinctly. As part of our user-centered design of such systems, we conducted an in-depth immersive qualitative study of twelve marine research scientists and engineers, interacting with a prototype Conversational Agent. Our results expose insights into the appropriate content and style for the natural language interaction and, from this study, we derive nine design recommendations to inform future Conversational Agent design for remote autonomous systems.