These findings strongly support the use ofVR integrated training in the welding industry.

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The focus of this article is perception affects and enhancement during ground robotic tele-operation. Three independent factors were studied, namely scale perception, distance perception, and orientation awareness. Enhancements for each factor was proposed, implemented, and evaluated. The results show that under remote perception conditions, where the operator was separated from the environment where the navigation took place, both distance perception and scale perception were significantly impaired as compared with that obtained under direct perception conditions. In addition, for each of the proposed enhancements designed for each critical factor, the corresponding factor was significantly improved. The broader impacts of this work can be applied to various human-robot collaborated applications, such as urban search and rescue. Applying the proposed enhancements will allow the operators to have fewer failures through hallways, doorways, or maneuvering around obstacles, as well as allowing a more accurate understanding of the area's layout when a map is not available.

Orientation awareness, being aware of heading direction, current location, and an object's location relative to current location are all critical for wayfinding. Obtaining and maintaining the orientation awareness is a challenging task and even more difficult in remote wayfinding where the wayfinder cannot physically be in the environment. This study designed an interface to enhance the orientation awareness under a remote wayfinding condition by providing a route map showing the previous path taken by the operator and evaluated its effectiveness. Sixteen participants were tested in this study with eight people in each group. The experimental group received the interface enhancement while the control group did not. Participants were required to remotely navigate a robot to explore an unknown environment, learning the layout as well as searching for exists and dangerous objects. They were then asked to draw the layout of the area and mark out exists and dangerous objects on the map they made. It was found that with the previous route map available, participants resulted in better understanding of the layout as reflected by the quality of the maps they made, compared to those that received no external information. It was also found that even with more information to perceive and process for the users of the enhanced interface, efficiency and subtask performance stayed the same as those who had less information to perceive or process. Results of this study proved the effectiveness of the proposed enhancement. WAYFINDING IN HUMAN-ROBOT COLLABORATED EXPLORATION: ORIENTATION AWARENESS AND ITS ENHANCEMENTOrientation awareness, being aware of heading direction, current location, and an object's location relative to current location are all critical for wayfinding. Obtaining and maintaining the orientation awareness is a challenging task and even more difficult in remote wayfinding where the wayfinder cannot physically be in the environment. This study designed an interface to enhance the orientation awareness under a remote wayfinding condition by providing a route map showing the previous path taken by the operator and evaluated its effectiveness. Sixteen participants were tested in this study with eight people in each group. The experimental group received the interface enhancement while the control group did not. Participants were required to remotely navigate a robot to explore an unknown environment, learning the layout as well as searching for exists and dangerous objects. They were then asked to draw the layout of the area and mark out exists and dangerous objects on the map they made. It was found that with the previous route map available, participants resulted in better understanding of the layout as reflected by the quality of the maps they made, compared to those that received no external information. It was also found that even with more information to perceive and process for the users of the enhanced interface, efficiency and subtask performance stayed the same as those who had less information t...

No abstract