Camera Placement and Multi-Camera Fusion for Remote Robot Operation

This paper studies the impact of camera location and multi-camera fusion with real robots in an urban search and rescue task through two sets of experiments. In the first, we compared a camera with an overhead view to a traditional forward looking camera. In the second, we compared the use of a single forward looking camera to the use of two cameras, one on the front of the robot and one on the rear. Our experiments show that an overhead view that includes the robot chassis significantly increases the situation awareness of the operator as measured by the number of collisions during a maze traversal. We also found that having two cameras, one forward-facing and one rear-facing, results in improved situation awareness. The addition of the rearfacing camera also eliminates many of the collisions that typically occur in the back of the robot when using a single camera.