How are Your Robot Friends Doing? A Design Exploration of Graphical Techniques Supporting Awareness of Robot Team Members in Teleoperation

While teleoperated robots continue to proliferate in domains including search and rescue, field exploration, or the military, human error remains a primary cause for accidents or mistakes. One challenge is that teleoperating a remote robot is cognitively taxing as the operator needs to understand the robot’s state and monitor all its sensor data. In a multi-robot team, an operator needs to additionally monitor other robots’ progress, states, notifications, errors, and so on to maintain team cohesion. We conducted a design exploration of novel graphical representations of robot team-member state, to support a person controlling one robot to maintain awareness of other robots in the team. Through a series of evaluations, we examined several design parameters (text, icon, facial expression, use of color, animation, and number of team robots), resulting in a set of guidelines for graphically representing team robot states in the remote team teleoperation.