Collaborative Remote Control of Unmanned Ground Vehicles in Virtual Reality

TL;DR

This paper introduces a collaborative VR system for remote control of unmanned ground vehicles, demonstrating that two operators working together reduce cognitive load and improve efficiency compared to a single operator.

Contribution

The study presents a novel collaborative VR system for teleoperation and evaluates its effectiveness, highlighting benefits of teamwork over individual operation in complex tasks.

Findings

Two-person groups had lower cognitive load than single operators.

Collaborative operation reduced total task time and number of operations.

Results support designing VR systems that facilitate teamwork for remote vehicle control.

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) technology is commonly used in entertainment applications; however, it has also been deployed in practical applications in more serious aspects of our lives, such as safety. To support people working in dangerous industries, VR can ensure operators manipulate standardized tasks and work collaboratively to deal with potential risks. Surprisingly, little research has focused on how people can collaboratively work in VR environments. Few studies have paid attention to the cognitive load of operators in their collaborative tasks. Once task demands become complex, many researchers focus on optimizing the design of the interaction interfaces to reduce the cognitive load on the operator. That approach could be of merit; however, it can actually subject operators to a more significant cognitive load and potentially more errors and a failure of collaboration. In this paper, we propose a new collaborative VR system to support two teleoperators working in the VR environment to remote control an uncrewed ground vehicle. We use a compared experiment to evaluate the collaborative VR systems, focusing on the time spent on tasks and the total number of operations. Our results show that the total number of processes and the cognitive load during operations were significantly lower in the two-person group than in the single-person group. Our study sheds light on designing VR systems to support collaborative work with respect to the flow of work of teleoperators instead of simply optimizing the design outcomes.