Making Robot Steering More Like Call of Duty Could Save Lives

A team from Sweden was able to greatly improve the ability of operators to perform tasks with remotely piloted emergency robots by making the bots steer less like tanks and more like a first-person shooter video game like Call of Duty. It’s a small change that could save lives in an environment where an emergency robot has a limited amount of time to perform a life or death task like finding a survivor in a collapsed building.

Emergency response robots are really just small, remotely controlled tanks so the default steering system, not surprisingly, is what videogame designers often refer to as tank controls. It’s a steering scheme common to video games of the dual analog control system era. The steering system operates just like it sounds. The player has to move the character to face a particular direction before the character can move in that direction. Result, awkward tank-like movement with characters forced to make full circles in order to turn around.

An example from the gaming world includes the much-maligned and mocked  Resident Evil Code Veronica. Reviewer Richard George’s 2011 takedown of the game includes this lengthy critique of tank steering among the game’s primary problems.

“Count the game's stilted, tank-like controls as the chief offender, as some simple alterations could have gone a long way. Instead poor Claire Redfield must rotate left and right (without moving her legs) before moving forward and backward. It certainly doesn't help that analog sticks have improved since the Dreamcast days. More sensitive, nuanced input means that movement is almost always exaggerated. As a result, my Claire typically ran through levels like a frantic, drunken hobo. Achieving that level of coordination was virtually a miracle in and of itself.”

Here is blogger Jaminson G. Robinson describing the gameplay Resident Evil 3: Nemesis as “stiff, non-human movement.”

Petter Ögren, an associate professor at the Center for Autonomous Systems (CAS) at Stockholm’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology, set out to test a counter-intuitive theory, that less tank-like controls could improve emergency workers’ ability to steer small, tank-like robots. He designed an alternative “free look” piloting system.

Free look control is common in first-person shooter games. It’s been around since 1992 but it wasn’t until the 1993 release of the blockbuster video game Doom that free look went on to become the defining characteristic of the first-person shooter, which were once actually called Doom clones. (Although, the degrees of freedom exhibited by the main character were very limited compared to free look controls today.) “The idea is to reduce the mental strain on the operator, so they can focus on the environment they are dealing with,” says Orgen.

If you’ve played a first-person shooter like the 1997 hit GoldenEye 007 and, of course, any of the games in the Call of Duty series, you’ve used free look controls.  Compare Nintendo Life video editor Rory Cocker’s description of the gameplay in Call of Duty to that of Robinson’s experience with Resident Evil.