A Study of the Man-machine Interface and Skill Levels of Operators by Analyzing Eye Movements in the Operation of a Space Robot

Abstract

We applied auditory information as well as visual information to achieve safe and reliable operation of the robot arm aboard Engineering Test Satellite VII (ETS-VII). In our earlier experiments, we found that performance of operators depends on their skill levels and on their respective degrees of familiarity with the user interface which they were usually using by the operator.
Previous studies of man-machine interfaces for use with space robots have mainly been focused applying visual information to on improve usability. We examined the relation between the skill levels of operators and the user interface. We conducted experiments with the user interface in a variety of modalities with and without auditory information to supplement the visual information. We used an eye-mark recorder (EMR) to assess the performance of the operators, because it is said that eye movement provides a good representation of the human mental state. EMR was used to measure the eye movements of human operators during the experiments. The result was that fixation times and spectra of the velocity frequency of eye movements in the observation of status display which provide information on the space robot differed according to the skill levels of operators.