Human centered tele-traversability boosts remote robot terrain navigation
Tele-Traversability: Rethinking Traversability for Teleoperated Ground Robots in Terrain Navigation
Robotics
Summary
When people remotely control robots to move over rough terrain, they and the robots often see the ground differently. This makes it hard for the person to judge if the robot can safely go forward. The authors suggest a new way to think about "traversability" that includes how the human operator feels and thinks, like how much attention or risk they can handle. This approach aims to help humans and robots better agree on what paths are safe and easier to navigate.
What this means in practice
- •For robot teleoperation teams: Improve remote control systems by incorporating human cognitive factors into traversability assessments for safer and smoother off-road navigation.
- •For robot interface designers: Design user interfaces that communicate terrain traversability in ways aligned with human operator attention and risk tolerance to reduce decision mismatches.
A position paper. It proposes an approach and reports no results.
Authors
Lewei Feng, Qi Chen, Wenshuo Wang, Xianghao Meng, Minh Kieu, Haijie Guan, Jin Wu, Fuchun Sun, Junqiang Xi
Abstract
Teleoperation, a human-in-the-loop control scheme, allows a human operator to remotely command and guide a mobile robot to navigate in off-road environments, yet fluent and user-friendly tele-navigation requires an alignment of traversability evaluation between human and robot. In the teleoperation system, the human operator typically utilizes off-site incomplete and delayed feedback via a human-machine interface to make a judgment of traversability, while the robot makes such an evaluation based on in situ onboard sensory information, which could cause divergent traversability estimation and thus generate mismatched decisions and actions. Existing approaches for traversability modeling, estimation, and prediction are mainly derived from the view of robots, i.e., robot-centric, and are practically suitable for fully autonomous mobile robots, but neglect the influence of human operators. To address this problem, this paper extends the concept of traversability from robot-centric to human-centric by accounting for the operator's cognitive states, such as attention, workload, and risk tolerance or awareness, termed tele-traversability. We first revisit the definitions and roles of traversability in robotics and then extend them to teleoperation settings. Finally, we highlight future trends and open challenges of tele-traversability toward human-centric teleoperation systems.