An ecological interface design approach to human supervision of a robot team

Abstract

When supervising a team of robots, the operator's task is not only the manipulation of each robot but also achievement of the top goal that is assigned to the entire team of humans and robots. A main goal of this study is development of a design concept based on the ecological interface design for human supervision of a robot team, providing information about states of functions that are necessary to understand the overall progress in the work and the situation. This paper describes an experimental study conducted to reveal basic efficacy using an experimental testbed simulation. The results suggest that the proposed approach has the ability to enable effective human supervision. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.