Augmented Reality and Remote Interaction with Military Unmanned Ground Vehicles

Sammanfattning: Interaction with unmanned ground vehicles have traditionally been done through a lap-top based system. New technology is on the rise which can provide new benefits to operating soldiers, with superimposed information and a more lightweight control unit, namely augmented reality. Designing interfaces for augmented reality systems have seen an improvement but has yet to be widely implemented in various domains. Satisfaction and high user acceptance are aspects that have been identified to be factors for success in the field of human-robot interaction. This thesis intends to explore interface design solutions for interactions with unmanned ground vehicles through augmented reality in head-mounted displays. This has been done through an iterative design process in the form of concept generation and prototyping. The produced prototype has then been evaluated with users to find usability issues and to measure the potential in the prototype to be satisfactory and have a high user acceptance. The evaluation resulted in eight usability issues of which three was critical. The three usability issues are (1) Video module was placed too far down of the user’s view, (2) Difficulties to find modules outside of the view, and (3) Crucial information to distinguish units was non-existent. The prototype did show signs of having potential of being satisfactory and have a high user acceptance, although there are issues which still need to be resolved before this user interface could be used by the military. It is a first step towards integrating augmented reality as a tool when interacting with UGV.