Virtual 360° Panorama for Remote Inspection

The use of remotely operated robotic systems in security related applications is becoming increasingly popular. However, the direct teleoperation interfaces commonly used today put a large amount of cognitive burden on the operators, thus seriously reducing the efficiency and reliability of these systems. In the context of an adjustable autonomy control architecture meant to relieve operators from unnecessary low-level tasks, we present an user interface technique for 360deg virtual panorama video as a perception aid to increase the situation awareness in tele-operation tasks, and as a block in the overall adjustable autonomy control architecture. At the hardware level, we rely on the intrinsic autonomy and robustness provided by the spherical morphology of our GroundBot robot. The work presented here is a step towards the overall goal of increasing the effectiveness of the GroundBot robot for remote inspection tasks.