Movement time and guidance accuracy in teleoperation of robotic vehicles

Two experiments are reported on the steering of a tracked vehicle through straight-line courses and corners to determine the relationships between movement time and control accuracy with the geometry of the course, such as the vehicle width, the track width and the type of corner. For straight line tracking, Drury's law in which movement time (MT) is linear with the tracking task difficulty measure [A/(W - d)] is found to hold, where A is the distance traveled, 'W' is the track width and 'd' is the vehicle width. Performance in three types of corners (right angle, cut angle and circular) varied little, with the most important factor being the clearance (W - d) available to the operator. Collisions with boundary walls were also highly related to this factor. The reported research has strong relevance to the training of operators for urban search and rescue robots. Practitioner summary: Data for steering a real vehicle in a simulated environment of straight paths and different corner geometries showed that Drury's law holds for straight line tracking and the clearance between the widths of vehicle and track is important in steering corners. Data show clear need for training of USAR (Urban Search and Rescue) operators.