Teleoperation of Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) is dependent on several factors as the human operator is physically detached from the UGV. The lack of Situation Awareness (SA) can lead to undesired behaviour of the UGV as the exlusive use of visual information to simultaneously perform the main task and to be aware of possible impediments to UGV operation becomes a very challenging task for a single human operator.
This assignment is being done in cooperation with i-Botics, a joint research and development center founded by TNO and the University Twente. i-Botics focuses on innovation for interaction robotics and telerobotics where the center of interest lies in designing systems in such a way that the operator is well supported with the best perceptual and manipulation tools in order to increase his or her situation awareness to perceive the remote environment as intuitive as possible.
The goal of this assignment is to design and implement haptic feedback for a remote pedal based robotic platform where the feedback is based on the presence of obstacles around the UGV. The main research question in this project is:"How can haptic feedback be designed in order to improve the situation awareness of a human operator in remote UGV control?"