Science, Engineering, and HCI

Hi, I am a Carnegie Mellon student observing the field test operations as apart of a Masters of Human-Computer Interaction capstone project. I am on a team with four other students and we are studying the process that scientists go through to create plans for the rover and analyze data. Using our observations as inspiration, we will design a piece of software that can help support the planning process for future field tests.

One of our observations during the field test was that scientists did not create plans directly. Instead, they described the observations they wanted and engineers used software to create the plans for them. There is a difference, however, between the way that scientists describe their goals and the way that engineers implement them using the software.

For instance, we noticed that scientists used many expressive gestures to explain their goals. When they wanted an image of a certain area on the map, they would point at the area on the projector screen and form a V shape with their hands to illustrate the desired field of view. However, the engineers needed to interpret these actions and input exact specifications, such as: “narrow/high resolution gigapan image."

We hope to create a tool that will allow scientists to input their goals in a visual way, and interpret the scientists’ input into a language that engineers can send to the rover.