Metric to Visual Aspects of the Human in Teleoperation of a Mobile Robot

The purpose of this paper is to define and develop a metric to estimate the selective visual attention (SVA) of an operator that teleoperates a mobile robot. Perception is the first stage of Situation Awareness which is defined as one of the main aspects of Human Factors, and the attention is a resource which strongly affects the Perception of humans. Many researchers have proposed a variety of methods for measuring any stage of the Situation Awareness, but just a few can be used in control close loop systems due to the nature of the methods. A definition of a novel metric is proposed, which quantifies the operator visual knowledge about the surrounding risk, based on visual selective attention and being able to be a used in a control close loop. A teleoperation of a mobile robot navigating in an unknown environment without colliding is suggested as an application for the method. Finally, results of the implementation of the measurement method are presented. Applications of this research include the teleoperation of robots, where the human operator commands have a strong influence in the controller of the main task and when the there exist limitations on the visual feedback.