Including a Model of Visual Processing With a Cognitive Architecture to Model a Simple Teleoperation Task

This article describes progress in providing user models with sufficient visual information and motor control to perform teleoperation with an unmodified, physically realized robot. User models that are built by extending cognitive models to interact directly with interfaces can provide a theoretical basis for predicting user behavior. These models can help in summarizing and explaining usability issues in domains for which conventional user testing is too time consuming, too demanding of other resources, or too dynamic for static models. The user model consists of an ACT-R cognitive model and the SegMan image-processing and interpretation system. ACT-R supports directing simple rover navigation and response-time predictions. SegMan supports interpreting many aspects of HCI interfaces and can now interpret simple aspects of video used in simple navigation tasks and can generate key presses and mouse actions directly. Processing limited amounts of an image as a human fovea helped make this system work in real time. A study in robot teleoperation provides evidence that the cognitive and perceptual-motor model approximates human behavior (based on comparison of task time, learning behavior, and mouse actions) in a simple navigation task. This work demonstrates how user modeling techniques are maturing to the extent that they can be used for assessing interfaces for dynamic tasks by predicting performance during teleoperation, a common human-robot interaction task.