Interfaces for Generating Flow in Teleoperation: game-based interaction design to improve teleoperator engagement and focus

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Teleoperation interfaces enable people to remotely control robots to accomplish a variety of tasks such as filming, firefighting, industrial equipment inspection, and maintenance. This can enable increased accessibility (e.g., not requiring physical fitness for a job) and safety (e.g., social distancing). However, teleoperation remains difficult to do safely in the long-term, with up to 70% of incidents attributed to human error: difficulties in robot control and sensor displays will result in operators misunderstanding the robot's situation or how to control it, causing collisions, operator stress, or other incidents. Teleoperation interfaces need to be better designed to support operators - to reduce stress and improve focus to reduce errors. I propose to build interfaces to encourage increased teleoperator focus, engagement, and sense of progression, that is, a state of flow, colloquially referred to as being "in the zone." The benefits of flow would help improve operator performance and lower stress, but it is not immediately clear how to design interfaces that encourage flow in teleoperation. Flow theory research has found that matching a person's skill to an appropriate level of challenge can help encourage a state of flow. In virtual settings like video games, flow can be designed for by calibrating the difficulty of the virtual challenges, but in real world and uncontrolled dynamic situations, a state of flow can be difficult to create and maintain. New research is required to understand how existing fully-virtual video game techniques could be adapted to the real-world constraints of teleoperation, and how new technologies can be created to improve the safety and health of teleoperators. My short-term objective for my team is to design techniques that can leverage the benefits of flow in teleoperation - we will do this by investigating how to structure, present, and calibrate challenges for operators, how to acknowledge and reward overcoming those challenges, and how to measure flow dynamically. During this research my HQPs will develop skills in interface design, evaluation, robotics, work with cutting-edge platforms, and publish at leading international venues. The long-term objective of my research program is to build interfaces that support teleoperation performance and reduce stress by shaping operator experience. The proposed research will work towards this goal by developing interfaces that encourage operator flow to improve performance in critical tasks, and that change how operators experience long teleoperation sessions (by increasing engagement, focus) and think about their work (by enabling a feeling of progress). This work will be relevant to remote control applications throughout consumer, industry, and emergency applications as remote-controlled robots become increasingly available in homes and workplaces. My work will increase accessibility, long-term use, safety, and performance in robotic technology.