Communicating via Augmented Reality for Human-Robot Teaming in Field Environments

This work focuses on the critical problem of treating humans and autonomous robots as peer teammates for tasks performed in unstructured, uninstrumented environments. To accomplish this peer relationship, we propose to use the communication of information to the human and the autonomous robot teammate as a method of influencing their behavior. We use augmented reality technology to achieve a bidirectional communication of information between teammates. We outline multiple strategies for information communication from the autonomous robot to the human teammate. We examine these alternatives in the context of human-robot cooperative exploration of an unknown and uninstrumented environment. We present results from three experiments which show potential influence on human task performance in cooperative exploration.