Experiments on operator matching in visual teleoperation

Visual feedback is an essential part of any telerobotic system. Traditional approaches have provided the operator with a view of the remote workcell either through TV monitors fed by cameras dotted around the workcell or by direct viewing. More recently, virtual viewing systems have been used for operator feedback because they allow the operator a choice of viewpoint. Care, however, must be taken to ensure that objects displayed by the virtual view are in true relation to their remote workcell counterparts. In this paper, the effects of two types of errors on operator performance are reported. The first type of error is due to offsets (biases) of the virtual object from their true workcell locations which are caused by modelling errors of the remote workcell. The second is caused by noise and dynamics induced by the sensors and filters used to track the position and orientation (pose) of the remote objects. Experiments are conducted to examine the performance of operators completing peg-in-hole tasks subject to the two errors. We conclude the paper by commenting on the validity of current operator motor control models