Supported independence on Mars: Design and evaluation of model-based ePartner support for astronauts on Mars

For manned missions to Mars, one of the challenges is to maintain safety in the complex and dynamic space environment. Communication to Mars will suffer from significant delays, potentially endangering a mission if assistance is needed immediately; therefore a high level of independence from ground control is necessary to be able to cope with non-nominal situations. An electronic partner (ePartner) can support human-robot teams by reasoning about the current situation and provide appropriate assistance. Different ePartner versions have previously been developed and tested, resulting in an extensive Requirements Baseline. In addition to these previous ePartner designs, the ePartner in this research will model the solution space in terms of functions (objectives), work processes and resources. This research will present a formal representation of the different abstraction levels to be able to reason about the mission status, make suggestions in non-nominal situations, and provide explanations. This should increase the users effectiveness, efficiency, trust and situational awareness. To evaluate this concept, an ePartner has been implemented as a mobile application on a tablet and user experiments have been conducted at the Delft University of Technology. The final conclusions of these experiments confirm an increase in effectiveness, efficiency and trust. Because of measurement limitations, the expected improvement on the situational awareness could not be proven. Following from these experiments, refinements of the existing Requirements Baseline are advised.Media & Knowledge EngineeringInteractive IntelligenceElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc

Augmented and Virtual Reality: Development of applications for a usability study

This report presents the development of an Augmented Reality (AR) application to visualize research data and the development of a 3D video game. These applications are completely developed at the University of Aveiro (UA) as a part of the Bachelor Project IN3700 of TU Delft. The AR application is used for a qualitative study which visualization method is most natural for human perception. The 3D game is used for a quantitative study of usability using different navigation methods.Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc

Usability in virtual and augmented environments: A qualitative and quantitative study

Virtual and Augmented Reality are developing rapidly: there is a multitude of environments and experiments in several laboratories using from simple HMD (Head-Mounted Display) visualization to more complex and expensive 6-wall projection CAVEs, and other systems. Still, there is not yet a clear emerging technology in this area, nor commercial applications based on such a technology are used in large scale. In addition to the fact that this is a relatively recent technology, there is little work to validate the utility and usability of Virtual and Augmented Reality environments when compared with the traditional desktop set-up. However, usability evaluation is crucial in order to design better systems that respond to the users’ needs, as well as for identifying applications that might really gain from the use of such technologies. This paper presents a preliminary usability evaluation of a low-cost Virtual and Augmented Reality environment under development at the University of Aveiro, Portugal. The objective is to assess the difference between a traditional desktop set-up and a Virtual/Augmented Reality system based on a stereo HMD. Two different studies were performed: the first one was qualitative and some feedback was obtained from domain experts who used an Augmented Reality set-up as well as a desktop in different data visualization scenarios. The second study consisted in a controlled experiment meant to compare users’ performances in a gaming scenario in a Virtual Reality environment and a desktop. The overall conclusion is that these technologies still have to overcome some hardware problems. However, for short periods of time and specific applications, Virtual and Augmented Reality seems to be a valid alternative since HMD interaction is intuitive and natural.Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc