Creation and Evaluation of a Human-Machine Interface for Teleoperating a Rover over a Portable Device

Abstract

The goal of this thesis is to design, implement and evaluate a Human-Machine Interface for a portable device to teleoperate a rover. The focus will be on designing a suitable GUI, researching and implementing methods on how to transfer the control data, camera stream and a danger map, and how to implement a specific controller, called spacemouse, in order to teleoperate the rover. For this purpose, a smartphone connected to a spacemouse controller was utilized. In addition three different approaches for the transmission of the camera stream and map were implemented and evaluated. The evaluation was based on testing in different terrains like sand and stones, and also on two user case studies. Among the investigated options were VNC, a software for remote controlling and visualization of the rover, ROS-mobile, a ROS App which displays ROS topics received over UDP, and GStreamer, an open source framework designed for compressing and sending media streams. This thesis is part of a student project on the rover called Luna Rover Mini (LRM). The project intends to have a robot that serves as a research and experimentation platform for students and scientists. Since the hardware is much less expensive than the space robots, more experimental opportunities can be achieved. The design of the LRM is based on the Exo Mars Rover, whose goal is to explore and collect data on mars. The software is based on the Lightweight Rover Unit (LRU), whose goal is to explore unknown and difficult to access terrain.