Assisted Driving of a Mobile Remote Presence System: System Design and Controlled Evaluation

• Authors: Leila Takayama, Eitan Marder-Eppstein, Helen Harris, Jenay Beer
• Institution/Company: Willow Garage, Inc., USA
• Forum: ICRA 2011

Citation

@inproceedings { tbd,
        title = {Assisted driving of a mobile remote presence system: System design and controlled user evaluations},
        booktitle = {International Conference on Robotics and Automation},
        year = {2011},
        author = {Leila Takayama and Eitan Marder-Eppstein and Helen Harris and Jenay Beer}
}

Full Text

ICRA2011_AssistedTeleop.pdf

Photos and Video Results

System Overview

Obstacle Course

Results from simple t-test that used only assisted vs. unassisted teleop: Operators hit fewer obstacles, but took longer to complete the obstacle course.

Results from repeated measures ANOVA that added in human dimensions: What mattered more than assisted vs. unassisted teleop was the human dimensions of spatial cognitive ability and locus of control (personality).

Video gaming experience also decreased how physically difficult the task seemed to be and how much participants enjoyed the task.

Documentation

Instructions for Reproducing Experiments

Checking Out the Code

The assisted_teleop package contains the code used in these experiments and can be found in the navigation_experimental stack. You can check this out as follows:

svn co https://code.ros.org/svn/ros-pkg/stacks/navigation_experimental/tags/navigation_experimental-0.1.2/

You'll also need the ROS navigation stack which you can check out here:

svn co https://code.ros.org/svn/ros-pkg/stacks/navigation/tags/navigation-1.2.2

Running Experiments

1. Set up obstacle course
2. Bring in volunteer participant
3. Have participant fill out demographics questionnaire
4. Practice: Run simplified course 3 times, untimed
5. Trial 1 (assisted or unassisted): Run full course once, timed
6. Fill out Questionnaire 1 about experience with operating robot
7. Trial 2 (unassisted or assisted): Run full course once, timed
8. Fill out Questionnaire 2 about experience with operating robot
9. Debrief participant about the purpose of the study and answer any questions or concerns that the participant may have

See the full paper for details on experiment procedure and data analysis.

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