Influence of situation awareness on control allocation for remote robots

When remote robots operate in unstructured environments, they are typically controlled or monitored by an operator, depending upon the available autonomy levels and the current level of reliability for the available autonomy. When multiple autonomy modes are available, the operator must determine a control allocation strategy. We conducted two sets of experiments designed to investigate how situation awareness and automation reliability affected the control strategies of the experiment participants. Poor situation awareness was found to increase the use of autonomy; however, task performance decreased even when the automation was functioning reliably, demonstrating the need to design robot interfaces that provide good situation awareness.