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Searching for a quantitative proxy for rover science effectiveness

Published: 02 March 2006 Publication History

Abstract

During two weeks of study in September and October of 2004, a science team directed a rover and explored the arid Atacama Desert in Chile. The objective of the mission was to search for life. Over the course of the mission the team gained experience with the rover and the rover became more reliable and autonomous. As a result, the rover/operator system became more effective. Several factors likely contributed to the improvement in science effectiveness including increased experience, more effective search strategies, different science team composition, different science site locations, changes in rover operational capabilities, and changes in the operation interface. However, it is difficult to quantify this effectiveness because science is a largely creative and unstructured task. This study considers techniques that quantify science team performance leading to an understanding of which features of the human-rover system are most effective and which features need further development. Continuous observation of the scientists throughout the mission led to coded transcripts enumerating each scientific statement. This study considers whether six variables correlate with scientific effectiveness. Several of these variables are metrics and ratios related to the daily rover plan, the time spent programming the rover, the number of scientific statements made and the data returned. The results indicate that the scientists created more complex rover plans without increasing the time to create the plans. The total number of scientific statements was approximately equal (2187 versus 2415) for each week. There was a 50% reduction in bytes of returned data between the two weeks resulting in an increase in scientific statements per byte of returned data ratio. Of the original six, the most successful proxies for science effectiveness were the time to program each rover task and the number of scientific statements related to data delivered by the rover. Although both these measures have face validity and were consistent with the results of this experiment, their ultimate empirical utility must be measured further.

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cover image ACM Conferences
HRI '06: Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCHI/SIGART conference on Human-robot interaction
March 2006
376 pages
ISBN:1595932941
DOI:10.1145/1121241
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 02 March 2006

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Author Tags

  1. human robot interaction (HRI)
  2. mobile robots
  3. remote rover exploration
  4. supervisory control
  5. teleoperation interface

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HRI06
HRI06: International Conference on Human Robot Interaction
March 2 - 3, 2006
Utah, Salt Lake City, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 268 of 1,124 submissions, 24%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Non-Dyadic Interaction: A Literature Review of 15 Years of Human-Robot Interaction Conference PublicationsACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction10.1145/348824211:2(1-32)Online publication date: 8-Feb-2022
  • (2022)Configuring Humans: What Roles Humans Play in HRI Research2022 17th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)10.1109/HRI53351.2022.9889496(478-492)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2022
  • (2008)Optimizing Information ValueIEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans10.1109/TSMCA.2008.91861438:3(593-604)Online publication date: 1-May-2008
  • (2007)Comparing different methods for assessing ground truth of rover data analysis for the 2005 season of the Life in the Atacama ProjectJournal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences10.1029/2006JG000318112:G4(n/a-n/a)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2007
  • (2006)Panoramic Image Information Utility for Mobile Robot Exploration2006 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man and Cybernetics10.1109/ICSMC.2006.384612(3216-3221)Online publication date: Oct-2006

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