Supporting Remote Manipulation: An Ecological Approach 

User interfaces for remote robotic manipulation widely lack sufficient support for situation awareness and, consequently, can induce high mental workload.  With poor situation awareness, operators may fail to notice task-relevant features in the environment often leading the robot to collide with the environment.  With high workload, operators may not perform well over long periods of time and may feel stressed.  We present an ecological visualization that improves operator situation awareness.

Our user study shows that operators using the ecological interface collided with the environment on average half as many times compared with a typical interface, even with a poorly calibrated 3D sensor; however, users performed more quickly with the typical interface.  The primary benefit of the user study is identifying several changes to the design of the user interface; preliminary results indicate that these changes improve the usability of the manipulator.