Evaluation of Human Performance with Kinematic and Haptic Errors

In teleoperation systems, link flexion results in kinematic errors, such that the position mapping between the master motion and slave motion is not correct. For haptic feedback teleoperators, this also causes errors in the direction of force feedback to the operator. This study examines human ability to compensate for rotational kinematic/haptic errors, where the mapping between master and slave kinematics and haptics has an error of 5 degrees. Using a 2-degree-of-freedom haptic system, with a virtual environment representing the slave robot and environment, subjects performed object tracing tasks on either a square or a circle with various combinations of correct and incorrect kinematics, and correct, incorrect, and absent haptic feedback. A point-to-point targeting task was performed between each tracing task to minimize the possibility of aftereffects. The results showed no significance for using different object shapes for the tracing task or for having haptic feedback in the targeting task. Incorrect haptic feedback proved to be comparable to having correct haptic feedback under our experimental conditions