Can i reach that? An affordance based metric of human-sensor-robot system effectiveness

Abstract

A person’s ability to perceive and act fluently in a remote environment through teleoperation of a robotic platform is clearly limited when compared to acting directly in an immediate environment. Despite the contrast between teleoperation and direct action, there are few metrics in the human robot interaction literature that are sensitive to these differences. Existing human-robot assessment studies rely on observational accounts and studies that simulate domain tasks, then applying ad hoc metrics to assess performance. These metrics are typically properties of the task like completion time, number of targets found, and operator mental workload. This study introduces a formal method and metric based on the perception of affordances. The study assesses a human-robot systems ability to perceive the reachability of an object using a mechanical arm. Affordance-based metrics are a new tool to quantify the effectiveness of different teleoperated sensor-robot systems designs.