The Ballad of the Bots: Sonification Using Cognitive Metaphor to Support Immersed Teleoperation of Robot Teams

As an embodied and spatial medium, virtual reality is proving an attractive proposition for robot teleoperation in hazardous environments. This paper examines a nuclear decommissioning scenario in which a simulated team of semi-autonomous robots are used to characterise a chamber within a virtual nuclear facility. This study examines the potential utility and impact of sonification as a means of communicating salient operator data in such an environment. However, the question of what sound should be used and how it can be applied in different applications is far from resolved. This paper explores and compares two sonification design approaches. The first is inspired by the theory of cognitive metaphor to create sonifications that align with socially acquired contextual and ecological understanding of the application domain. The second adopts a computationalist approach using auditory mappings that are commonplace in the literature. The results suggest that the computationalist approach outperforms the cognitive metaphor approach in terms of predictability and mental workload. However, qualitative data analysis demonstrates that the cognitive metaphor approach resulted in sounds that were more intuitive, and were better implemented for spatialisation of data sources and data legibility when there was more than one sound source.

Towards an immersive user interface for waypoint navigation of a mobile robot

In this paper, we investigate the utility of head-mounted display (HMD) interfaces for navigation of mobile robots. We focus on the selection of waypoint positions for the robot, whilst maintaining an egocentric view of the robot's environment. Inspired by virtual reality (VR) gaming, we propose a target selection method that uses the 6 degrees-of-freedom tracked controllers of a commercial VR headset. This allows an operator to point to the desired target position, in the vicinity of the robot, which the robot then autonomously navigates towards. A user study (37 participants) was conducted to examine the efficacy of this control strategy when compared to direct control, both with and without a communication delay. The results of the experiment showed that participants were able to learn how to use the novel system quickly, and the majority of participants reported a preference for waypoint control. Across all recorded metrics (task performance, operator workload and usability) the proposed waypoint control interface was not significantly affected by the communication delay, in contrast to direct control. The simulated experiment indicated that a real-world implementation of the proposed interface could be effective, but also highlighted the need to manage the negative effects of HMDs - particularly VR sickness.