Effect of force and acoustic feedback on teleoperation work

Abstract

It has been reported that the operation efficiency during teleoperation under stereoscopic video images is inferior to that of using the naked eye on the spot in real working environments. One of the reasons to explain this might be the smaller amount of information which is provided to the subject when working under stereoscopic images compared with that gotten by direct viewing in the real working environment. In our daily lives, we obtain information through various senses; the visual sense, acoustical sense, tactile sense and so on. The smaller amount of information causes a low working performance in the teleoperation. Some papers showed the improvement of operation efficiency when the subject got acoustic and/or tactile feedback as well as visual feedback in a simulated environment. We investigated to clarify the effects of force and acoustic feedback information with stereoscopic video images to subjects on the performance of the teleoperation using an actual robot. In experiment 1, we used the teleoperated system in which subjects could control the robot arm (the slave manipulator) to pick up cylindrical objects and to insert them in a hole by operating the input-and-tactile-information-display-system (the master manipulator). The results of experiment 1 showed that the force and acoustic information did not improve the working performance, and rather interfered with it. In experiment 2, we investigated the operation efficiency under conditions that force or acoustic feedback was given in the teleoperated work by eliminating contact information acquirable from vision. As a result of the experiment, force and acoustic information was not an effective way to shorten the completion time when the actual teleoperated robot was used.