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How are your robot friends doing? A design exploration of graphical techniques supporting awareness of robot team members in teleoperation

While teleoperated robots continue to proliferate in domains including search and rescue, field exploration, or the military, human error remains a primary cause for accidents or mistakes. One challenge is that teleoperating a remote robot is cognitively taxing as the operator needs to understand the robot's state and monitor all its sensor data. In a multi-robot team, an operator needs to additionally monitor other robots' progress, states, notifications, errors, and so on to maintain team cohesion. One strategy for supporting the operator to comprehend this information is to improve teleoperation interface designs to carefully present data. We present a set of prototypes that simplify complex team robot states and actions, with an aim to help the operator to understand information from the robots easily and quickly. We conduct a series of pilot studies to explore a range of design parameters used in our prototypes (text, icon, facial expression, use of color, animation, and number of team robots), and develop a set of guidelines for graphically representing team robot states in the remote team teleoperation.