A visual and force feedback for multi-robot teleoperation in outdoor environments: A preliminary result

For teleoperation of multiple mobile robots (e.g., unmanned aerial vehicles), a better situational awareness of remote environments is crucial for good performance. Visual and force feedback are the most common ways to perceive the environments accurately using a vision system and a haptic device, respectively. In outdoor environments, however, it is difficult to use adequate/accurate sensors (e.g., global localization system) for haptic feedback of the remote environments as well as the slave robots. In this paper, we propose a visual and force feedback method to enhance a human operator´s situational awareness in multi-robot teleoperation by fabricating a global view of the multi-robot system and transmitting velocity information of one, respectively, using only local information of the robots. The proposed visual feedback method, then, is evaluated via two psychophysical experiments: maneuvering and searching tests. Several measures are also proposed to assess the human operator´s maneuverability and situational awareness quantitatively.