"Where am I?" Acquiring situation awareness using a remote robot platform

Human-robot interaction with urban search and rescue (USAR) robots needs to provide operators with a means of maintaining situation awareness (SA), especially since the USAR operators usually cannot see the robots that they are directing. We used a technique from human-computer interaction known as usability testing, plus implicit and explicit SA measurement techniques, to investigate USAR operators´ levels of SA and strategies for maintaining SA. We found that operators developed different SA strategies, spent an average of 30% of their time solely in SA activities, had less SA of the space behind the robot than in front or on the sides, did not use automatically-generated maps to gain SA, and had difficulty maintaining SA when in the autonomous mode.