Design and development of a cockpit avatar control station, for the control of a remote robotic avatar

• Main Author: Lee, Jong Chin.
• Other Authors: Seet Gim Lee, Gerald
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Mechanical engineering::Mechatronics
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/53269
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Since our world today is a globalized environment, either working in various places or dealing with people in different countries, is rather common and frequent from past. To follow the fast pace in today’s society, communication without leaving existing place is needed in certain time. This lead to a growing trend towards having conference in the way of telepresence, this would help in an efficient communication and smooth interaction, especially when greater distance become a problem of communication between different parties. Thus this has driven the research on telepresence robot. MAVEN is an acronym for “Mobile Avatar for Virtual Engagement by NTU”, and the research of this project will be based on MAVEN. The objective of this project is to design and develop an interface for human operator to control a remote robotic avatar. The interface imbued with a Graphical-User-Interface (GUI) and multiple modality input and output devices. With User Centred GUI design, the remote control interface would boost the performance of human-robot interaction. Two camera views from MAVEN and robot location map have been developed and displayed in the GUI, and also the additional support of using joystick. All these combinations get user and MAVEN prepared to attending a teleconference. Experiment on usage scenario is done to study the users’ overall experience for future improvement. Benefit from the feedbacks from the potential users, many opportunities were identified to reduce the operator workload and encourage situation awareness. In conclusion, a reliable telepresence interface has been successfully implemented to enhance telepresence by promoting usability as well as immersiveness. To be in line with any new requirement to this interface in future, the system structure of this interface allows future GUI designer to do further improvement and integration with others functionality.