Augmented Reality for Improved Teleoperation of Planetary Rovers with Increased Situation Awareness

November 26, 2024

In the world of planetary exploration, the use of ground mobile robots, namely planetary rovers, to carry out survey missions of these remote environments is definitely a staple. However, the teleoperation of these vehicles still proves to have multiple issues that need solving, and overall techniques that need improving, in preparation for the possibility of carrying out these missions with astronauts settled within the planet. When dealing with planetary rovers, these are very expensive and hard to deploy robots, hence why it is critical that their operation is done in the safest and most effective way possible. This dissertation aims to address the issues related to the human interaction, by presenting an augmented reality user interface that displays crucial mission information in a way that aims to ensure the highest situation awareness possible, with the goal of improving their decision-making capabilities. This system is compared to a baseline teleoperation interface in an experiment in which users engage in the teleoperation of a ground robot to execute tasks pertinent to the exploration of a remote environment. The results show that some of the metrics did not indicate statistical significance in the quality of teleoperation when using augmented reality; however, participants perceived important improvements in their understanding of the environment and overall robot safety while teleoperating with this system, revealing how beneficial augmented reality may be in this field.

Authors in the community:

• 

  G

  Gonçalo Gomes da Silva Coelho

  ist193073

Supervisors of this institution:

• 

  R

  Rodrigo Martins de Matos Ventura

  ist13950

electrical-engineering-electronic-engineering-information-engineering - Electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering

eng - English

Instituto Superior Técnico