Human-system interaction for bomb squad applications: Preliminary experiments with low cost cameras in real world deployment

A sufficient level of situational awareness is crucial in the operation of remote, teleoperated robots to fulfil a mission. While much work has been done in user interfaces, camera systems and so-on to improve situational awareness, it is an unfortunate fact that few of these developments have filtered down into operational use. In this paper, we describe our preliminary work on improving situational awareness provided to the operator of at EOD or Explosive Ordnance Disposal Robot. We focus on the effect of adding low cost wide angle cameras to an existing, deployed robotic platform and the result of experiments as to effective placement of the cameras within the existing robot system. Unique to our work is the fact that these improvements have been used operationally and found to improve mission performance.