Comparing VR Exploration Support for Ground-Based Rescue Robots

Rescue robots have been extensively used in crisis situations for exploring dangerous areas. This exploration is usually facilitated via a remote operation by the rescue team. Although Virtual Reality (VR) was proposed to facilitate remote control due to its high level of immersion and situation awareness, we still lack intuitive and easy-to-use operation modes for search and rescue teams in VR environments. In this work, we propose four operation modes for ground-based rescue robots to utilize an efficient search and rescue: (a) Handle Mode, (b) Lab Mode, (c) Remote Mode, and (d) UI Mode. We evaluated these operation modes in a controlled lab experiment (N = 8) in terms of robot collisions, number of rescued victims, and mental load. Our results indicate that control modes with robot automation (UI and Remote mode) outperform modes with full control given to participants. In particular, we discovered that UI and Remote Mode lead to the lowest number of collisions, driving time, visible victims remaining, rescued victims, and mental load.