A Virtual Rover Interface for Collaborative Human-Robot Exploration Teams

Future planetary exploration missions will employ teams of rovers as astronaut assistants and independent scouts. Individual and cooperative tasks must be accurately modeled. Mission controllers and astronauts must maintain situational awareness through global and local perspectives of the exploration team members and their environment. This paper describes the development and integration of a mixed-reality graphical interface that provides a series of real-time three-dimensional views of the team. Astronaut and rover activities are rendered on an environment map with a variety of negotiable global views and local perspective views corresponding to onboard video acquired by each rover. The virtual reality (VR) graphics system described in this paper is integrated within a planner/scheduling framework that also supports real astronauts and rovers, enabling the overall team to be composed of real and virtual entities. VR graphics are combined with a set of menu interfaces that facilitate the specification of goals, commands, and constraints through the same environment in which the graphics are presented. Update rates (computational overhead) for the VR software are evaluated as a function of model fidelity and kinematics computations, providing a measure of practicality for this system as a tool for mission controllers and for suited astronauts with limited perceptual capabilities.