Visual and Manual Control for Human-Robot Teleoperation

In an effort to assess simple control modalities for a remote robotic system, this study explores and tests the suitability of four interfaces for teleoperation in human-robot interaction. For a pick-and-place task, users were asked to select targets and locations using eye tracking (activated by either a mouse click or dwell time), a touchscreen, or a standard computer mouse. Contrary to their expectations, the authors found that eye-tracking-based interaction, especially when paired with manual-click selection, was generally slower and was perceived as more difficult than the mouse and touchscreen interfaces. Conversely, as predicted, they found evidence that eye tracking with dwell selection was less prone to interference caused by a secondary manual task.