Toward Standard Guidelines to Design the Sense of Embodiment in Teleoperation Applications: A Review and Toolbox

A multidisciplinary investigation to unravel the complexity of the sense of embodiment in teleoperation

“…SoE refers to the process of developing a sense of ownership (feeling of self-attribution), a trustworthy sense of agency (feeling of control), and a sense of self-location (the perception of being located in a volume of space) over a surrogate that could be represented by a mannequin, a robotic or virtual avatar. In this research, we focus on remote avatars controlled through the teleoperation setup [76,82,132,160,246] (see Figure 1.1 for a general representation of the architecture of a teleoperation system and three sample applications). As reported in [189], the term avatar lacks a standard definition.…”

“…The most common methods for quantifying the strength of the embodiment experience includes subjective self-reports assessed with questionnaires or interviews (explicit measures), and measures of the perceived position of the own hand, physiological measures, or task performance (implicit measures) [76,212]. In RHI questionnaires, subjective experiences relating to the sense of ownership over the artificial hand, the sense of agency over movements of the artificial hand, and the sense of self-location are typically rated on a Likert scale [29,198].…”

“…The interest in designing and measuring embodiment is carried by one goal: implementing systems that enhance a telepresence experience beyond the feeling of being present at a remote location, by transporting both the functional and social self of the user [257]. The SoE and the multisensory integration of the perceptual cues become two relevant points to address in the design of a telepresence experience [74,76]. In [246], the authors discuss two cognitive models that are currently used to describe the sensory processes underlying embodiment.…”

“…The main purpose is to present a toolbox to achieve, based of the literature and practical examples, the desired SoE while designing and implementing teleoperation systems. The contents of this chapter are published in [76]. Chapter 3 concerns a topic when coming to embodiment: its assessment.…”

“…It introduces the difference between explicit and implicit measures, and it provides an overview on the most commonly used assessment measures and some new approaches that we propose (RQ 3 and 4). The content of this chapter is based on a collection of publications [75,78]. Chapter 4 presents a study that we realized to define and rank the effect of the most relevant (according to the literature) perceptual cues that affect the embodiment components and task performance (RQ 5, 6, and 7).…”