Examination of the STRIPE vehicle teleoperation system

This paper describes a series of quantitative studies of a user interface for robot vehicle teleoperation. Supervised TeleRobotics using Incremental Polyhedral Earth geometry (STRIPE) is a teleoperation system for a robot vehicle that allows a human operator to accurately control the remote vehicle across very low bandwidth communication links, and communication links with large delays. In STRIPE, a single image from a camera mounted on the vehicle is transmitted to the operator workstation. The operator uses a mouse to pick a series of `waypoints' in the image that define a path that the vehicle should follow. These 2D waypoints are then transmitted back to the vehicle, where they are used to compute the appropriate steering commands while the next image is being transmitted. STRIPE requires no advance knowledge of the terrain to be traversed. This paper describes a series of tests of the STRIPE system. Individuals with no previous STRIPE experience were given brief instructions in the use of the system, and then asked to use STRIPE to teleoperate the Carnegie Mellon Navlab 2 vehicle along a simple path, through a slalom course, and to find a goal using a very limited on-line map. Conditions tested include different graphical interfaces, bandwidths, lenses, and rates of image compression.