ABSTRACT
Both audio and visual perceptions are critical for soldiers to gain situation awareness (SA) of their surroundings. However, when unmanned ground vehicles are used for reconnaissance, it has not been established whether high fidelity (i.e., stereoscopic vision and three dimensional audio) perceptions will enhance awareness and effectiveness relative to lower fidelity capabilities that are more common to existing systems. This report describes the effectiveness of robotic telepresence features that included enhanced visual and three-dimensional audio sensors, along with naturalistic head-mounted control of camera movement. Soldiers performed equivalent search and identify tasks with each controller interface. Measures included indices of performance (e.g., time, accuracy), workload (NASA-TLX), SA, and user experience. Results indicated that the integrated multisensory perception and naturalistic control provided by telepresence features contributed to better task performance and lower workload. This experiment was conducted as part of a research collaboration between the US Army
Research Lab field element at Fort Benning, GA, and TNO Netherlands.
