Exploring Effects of Information Filtering With a VR Interface for Multi-Robot Supervision

Supervising and controlling remote robot systems currently requires many specialised operators to have knowledge of the internal state of the system in addition to the environment. For applications such as remote maintenance of future nuclear fusion reactors, the number of robots (and hence supervisors) required to maintain or decommission a facility is too large to be financially feasible. To address this issue, this work explores the idea of intelligently filtering information so that a single user can supervise multiple robots safely. We gathered feedback from participants using five methods for teleoperating a semi-autonomous multi-robot system via Virtual Reality (VR). We present a novel 3D interaction method to filter the displayed information to allow the user to read information from the environment without being overwhelmed. The novelty of the interface design is the link between Semantic and Spatial filtering and the hierarchical information contained within the multi robot system. We conducted a user study including a cohort of expert robot teleoperators comparing these methods; highlighting the significant effects of 3D interface design on the performance and perceived workload of a user teleoperating many robot agents in complex environments. The results from this experiment and subjective user feedback will inform future investigations that build upon this initial work.