ABSTRACT
The challenges in perception and situation awareness in human-robot interaction in a USAR environment revealed in our study confirm Sheridan’s (1992) findings regarding the difficulties in teleproprioception and telekinesthesis during teleoperation. Our findings suggest one of the main challenges in achieving effective human-robot interaction will be bridging the cognitive gaps between these two entities. The tasks of navigating, searching, mapping, interpreting what is being seen on the video monitor, making decisions about what to do with that information, and dealing with the physical stresses of the job may be overloading the operator in the USAR environment as well. Training and experience may assist the USAR robot operator in cop-
ing with stress and the many tasks to be accomplished, and in forming a mental model of how “robot’s eye” information is conveyed and then interpreted. We conclude from our data, however, that the information being received from the robot does not match the operator’s current mental model. One explanation may be that the perceptual cues (e.g., the keyhole effect noted by Woods et al., 2004) are challenging the operator, and that is where the cognitive defi
