Abstract
Transferring skills and expertise to remote places, without being present, is a new challenge for our digitally interconnected society. People can experience and perform actions in distant places through a robotic agent wearing immersive interfaces to feel physically there. However, technological contingencies can affect human perception, compromising skill-based performances. Considering the results from studies on human factors, a set of recommendations for the construction of immersive teleoperation systems is provided, followed by an example of the evaluation methodology. We developed a testbed to study perceptual issues that affect task performance while users manipulated the environment either through traditional or immersive interfaces. The analysis of its effect on perception, navigation, and manipulation relies on performances measures and subjective answers. The goal is to mitigate the effect of factors such as system latency, field of view, frame of reference, or frame rate to achieve the sense of telepresence. By decoupling the flows of an immersive teleoperation system, we aim to understand how vision and interaction fidelity affects spatial cognition. Results show that misalignments between the frame of reference for vision and motor-action or the use of tools affecting the sense of body position or movement have a higher effect on mental workload and spatial cognition.
Highlights
A telepresence robot presents a solution for doctors and health care workers to consult, handle, or monitor people in remote places or in contaminated areas, avoiding self-exposure
We propose an immersive interface testbed that enables the manipulation of perceptual factors and an analysis of their impact on immersion, presence, task performance, and workload
Task performance related measures: Figure 7 depicts the mean task-time performance and standard deviation for the key block sequence touches while using the traditional interface and the immersive interface, Task 1 setup
Summary
A telepresence robot presents a solution for doctors and health care workers to consult, handle, or monitor people in remote places or in contaminated areas, avoiding self-exposure. Telerobotics is already present in areas like surgery (e.g., the Da Vinci Robot) [4], remote inspection, space exploration [5,6], underwater maintenance, nuclear disposal, hazardous environment cleaning, and search and rescue. Most of these robotic interventions in critical tasks still rely on the human’s control capabilities. Teleoperated robots quite often include semi-autonomous functionalities to assist operators. To this end, cognitive human-robot interaction architectures are being used to minimize the control workload, improve the task performance, and increase safety [7,8]. The design of such cognitive robotic systems can integrate the knowledge of human perceptual factors to predict the intended actions and needs of operators
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