A Picture-in-Picture Interface for a Multiple Robot System

An exciting possibility is that robot teams may be deployed in the future to assist in Chemical, Biological, Nuclear, Radiological, and Explosive (CBNRE) situations. As such, the human-robotic interface that people use to control these robot teams must be near-ideal. The interface must provide for what Drury et al. call situational awareness (Drury et al., 2003). Previous studies have shown the importance of situational awareness when one person controls multiple robots (Humphrey et al., 2007). This paper describes the development of an interface that used picture-in-picture functionality that may improve the situational awareness when controlling multiple robots. The new interface utilized the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University’s Urban Search And Rescue Simulation (USARSim) and its MultiView object (Wang et al., 2005) to add a bird’s-eye view of the simulation in the grey halo area from the previous interface (Humphrey et al., 2007).