Human coordination of robot teams: an empirical study of multimodal interface design

Human Robot Interaction is an emerging area of interdisciplinary research that requires contributions from the areas of robotics, human computer interaction, cognitive sciences, multimodal interfaces and others. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of human robot interaction, the research proposed here advances not only the body of knowledge within human robot interaction but also in user interface design, information fusion, visual display and multimodal interaction. This research will focus on a comparative study between multimodal interfaces. Each interface style will require information fusion and multimodal interaction to provide the user with appropriate capabilities and awareness to manage their robot team. The study will determine which interface improves the user's ability to efficiently manage a robot team. The research proposed here will build upon findings, solutions and results provided by existing literature. This research will focus on the following human performance characteristics: (1) Mental Workload; (2) Task Completion Time; (3) Task Completion Rate.