Effects of Haptic Guidance and Force Feedback on Mental Rotation Abilities in a 6-DOF Teleoperated Task

In a typical space teleoperation task, mismatches between the viewing direction of the operator and the direction of their required control input are often unavoidable. To execute these tasks, the operator is then required to perform mental rotations. Recent studies have shown that the task performance can thereby significantly decrease. In this paper, for the first time, the influence of mental rotations on task performance is studied if haptic feedback is provided to the operator. A human factors experiment is conducted which analyses the influence of two different haptic feedback control methods via various visual missmatch angles. The rotation is thereby set to the extreme cases of 0. and 180. to clearly analyze the effects. The first haptic feedback method consists of direct, scaled force and torque feedback to the operator as measured by a force/torque sensor at the slave robot. The second method consists of haptic shared control which provides artificially generated guidance forces to the operator. It is shown that mental rotations decrease teleoperation performance despite the addition of direct force feedback. In contrast, haptic shared control provides lower increase in the operator mental workload and also less between-operator variability of errors made due to the mental rotations.