Development of a test bed for evaluating human-robot performance for explosive ordnance disposal robots

This paper discusses the development of a test bed to evaluate the combined performance of the human operator and an explosive ordnance disposal robot. We have other means of evaluating the capabilities of the robots but for the robots to be truly useful it is necessary to understand how effectively and efficiently operators will be able to use these robots in critical situations. In this paper we discuss the tasks developed for the test bed and how we are going about development of the metrics for assessing the human-robot performance and, more specifically, the human-robot user interface.