Abstract
Directly teleoperated uninhabited ground vehicles (UGVs) can grant field teams access to places and information previously unavailable. Despite their capability, the video from these vehicles can make teleoperated navigation difficult by cutting out valuable information about the spatial context around the UGV. Typically, UGV cameras provide their operators with a very narrow, “soda straw” field of view (FOV) and a first-person camera perspective. The present research investigated two methods for providing an operator with additional contextual information: widening the FOV and capturing a third-person perspective of the vehicle in its environment. The results indicate that the additional information provided by either method can facilitate aspects of navigation performance. Of the two methods, widening the FOV produced the greatest performance benefit in our task. However, if the FOV cannot be widened, the results suggest that capturing a third-person perspective may facilitate certain aspects of navigation. Finally, the benefits associated with each method were found to be additive. This result suggests that ideal video displays may incorporate both methods, but further research is necessary to understand how the specific information provided by each method impacts the many types of tasks involved in teleoperated navigation.
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