Improving the Understanding of a Remote Environment by Immersive Man-Machine Interaction

In a changing world, the way we interact with machines must change as well. Teleoperation becomes more important. This poses its own set of challenges. To solve these a new Human-Machine interface must be developed. By developing this HMI around the concept of immersion, these challenges can be solved. This new kind of HMI can be applied to different fields. Examples using forestry or remote robot operations are demonstrated.

Medical Cyber Physical System Architecture for Smart Medical Pumps

The transformations through technological innovations have influenced the medical field. There are significant developments in medical devices in their usage. The utilization of the devices is automated in a local, remote environment. The medical devices used in the remote cyber environment uses different network protocols. These devices comprise micro, nanofabricated sensors and actuators which have the facility to communicate using network protocols. The devices that have network capability to integrate into cyberspace through physical methods are typical medical cyber physical systems (MCPS). In MCPS, medical device modelling is an important aspect. Several medical devices are available, and here in the current research, emphasis is focused on smart medical pumps in the MCPS environment. This chapter highlights the essential concepts of the smart medical drug delivery device, its architecture, control, actuation, communication, and analysis in the cyber environment.

Effectiveness of Social Interactivity in Merchant Websites on Emotional and Behavioral Responses

In a context of hyper connectivity, the designers of commercial websites are constantly seeking to generate favorable psychological states among internet users and to re-enchant them. This research aims to study the effect of the interaction between the social dimensions of interactivity on psychological states and the approach behavior of the e-consumer. Experimentation is chosen as the most appropriate method for testing the proposed model. An online experiment was conducted with 662 internet users. A merchant website was designed for the purposes of the study incorporating the interaction forms investigated. The results of this research underline the power of the social dimension of interactivity in the mediated market environments and show that a socially interactive site can generate the user's flow state, as well as a feeling of being physically present in a remote environment. This relation is moderated by the perceived risk.

Situation Awareness in Remote Operators of Autonomous Vehicles: Developing a Taxonomy of Situation Awareness in Video-Relays of Driving Scenes

Even entirely driverless vehicles will sometimes require remote human intervention. Existing SA frameworks do not acknowledge the significant human factors challenges unique to a driver in charge of a vehicle that they are not physically occupying. Remote operators will have to build up a mental model of the remote environment facilitated by monitor view and video feed. We took a novel approach to “freeze and probe” techniques to measure SA, employing a qualitative verbal elicitation task to uncover what people “see” in a remote scene when they are not constrained by rigid questioning. Participants (n = 10) watched eight videos of driving scenes randomized and counterbalanced across four road types (motorway, rural, residential and A road). Participants recorded spoken descriptions when each video stopped, detailing what was happening (SA Comprehension) and what could happen next (SA Prediction). Participant transcripts provided a rich catalog of verbal data reflecting clear interactions between different SA levels. This suggests that acquiring SA in remote scenes is a flexible and fluctuating process of combining comprehension and prediction globally rather than serially, in contrast to what has sometimes been implied by previous SA methodologies (Jones and Endsley, 1996; Endsley, 2000, 2017b). Inductive thematic analysis was used to categorize participants’ responses into a taxonomy aimed at capturing the key elements of people’s reported SA for videos of driving situations. We suggest that existing theories of SA need to be more sensitively applied to remote driving contexts such as remote operators of autonomous vehicles.

A Versatile Aerial Manipulator Design and Realization of UAV Take-Off from a Rocking Unstable Surface

UAVs are one of the fastest types of robots that can be deployed in a remote environment. Unfortunately, they have a limited flight time and therefore may need to stop occasionally in an unknown, uncontrolled area. However, conventional UAVs require flat and stationary surfaces for a safe landing and take-off. Some studies on adaptive landing approach for UAVs can be found in the past, but adaptive take-off from non-flat surfaces has not been discussed for the most part, yet. In this work, we discuss the problems associated with a conventional UAV take-off from non-flat surfaces and provide a novel approach for UAV take-off from a sloped or rocking surface. We also discuss the design of a novel multitasking three-arm aerial manipulator system with parallel link mechanism and achieve the above-mentioned task. With experiments, we show that the system can provide stability for a UAV landing on a rocking surface that allows for a safe take-off.

FPGA Remote Laboratory Using IoT Approaches

Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are relatively high-end devices that are not easily shared between multiple users. In this work, we achieved a remotely accessible FPGA framework using accessible Internet of Things (IoT) approaches. We sought to develop a method for students to receive the same level of educational quality in a remote environment that they would receive in a typical, in-person course structure for a university-level digital design course. Keeping cost in mind, we are able to combine the functionality of an entry-level FPGA and a Raspberry Pi Zero to provide IoT access for laboratory work. Previous works in this field allow only one user to access an FPGA at a time, which requires students to schedule time slots. Our design is unique in that it gives multiple users the ability to interact simultaneously with one individual top-level design on an FPGA. This novel design has the benefit for classroom presentations, collaboration and debugging, and eliminates the need for restricting student access to a time slot for FPGA access. Further, our hardware wrapper is lightweight, utilizing less than 1% of tested FPGA chips, allowing it to be integrated with resource-heavy designs. The application is meant to scale with large designs; there is no difference between how many users can interact with the remote design, regardless of the complexity of the design. Further, the number of users who can interact with a single project is limited only by the bandwidth restrictions imposed by Google Fire Base, which is far beyond any practical number of users for simultaneous access.

Teleoperated Service Robot with an Immersive Mixed Reality Interface

Teleoperated service robots can perform more complex and precise tasks as they combine robot skills and human expertise. Communication between the operator and the robot is essential for remote operation and strongly affects system efficiency. Immersive interfaces are being used to enhance teleoperation experience. However, latency or time delay can impair the performance of the robot operation. Since remote visualization involves transmitting a large amount of video data, the challenge is to decrease communication instability. Then, an efficient teleoperation system must have a suitable operation interface capable of visualizing the remote environment, controlling the robot, and having a fast response time. This work presents the development of a service robot teleoperation system with an immersive mixed reality operation interface where the operator can visualize the real remote environment or a virtual 3D environment representing it. The virtual environment aims to reduce the latency on communication by reducing the amount of information sent over the network and improve user experience. The robot can perform navigation and simple tasks autonomously or change to the teleoperated mode for more complex tasks. The system was developed using ROS, UNITY 3D, and sockets to be exported with ease to different platforms. The experiments suggest that having an immersive operation interface provides improved usability for the operator. The latency appears to improve when using the virtual environment. The user experience seems to benefit from the use of mixed reality techniques; this may lead to the broader use of teleoperated service robot systems.