Comparison of Teleoperation and Supervisory Control for Navigation and Driving with Degraded Communications

Teleoperation is the currently accepted method of control of military unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) in the field. Degraded communications affects the operator's tasks of driving, navigating and maintaining UGV situation awareness. A potential approach to address this challenge is to provide the UGV with local autonomy to generate driving commands (translation and rotation rates). This paper describes an experiment and preliminary results comparing "point-and-go" supervisory control in which the operator designates a goal point on the 2D driving display to teleoperation as a function of communications degradation and terrain roughness. Three methods of visual supervisory control were tested (visual dead reckoning and two visual sevoing methods) and compared to teleoperation.