While teleoperated robots continue to proliferate in domains including search and rescue, field exploration, or the military, human error remains a primary cause for accidents or mistakes. One challenge is that teleoperating a remote robot is cognitively taxing as the operator needs to understand the robot’s state and monitor all its sensor data. In a multi-robot team, an operator needs to additionally monitor other robots’ progress, states, notifications, errors, and so on to maintain team cohesion. We conducted a design exploration of novel graphical representations of robot team-member state, to support a person controlling one robot to maintain awareness of other robots in the team. Through a series of evaluations, we examined several design parameters (text, icon, facial expression, use of color, animation, and number of team robots), resulting in a set of guidelines for graphically representing team robot states in the remote team teleoperation.
