Interface Transparency Issues in Teleoperation

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.