In the future, it will become more common for humans to team up with robotic systems to perform tasks that humans cannot realistically accomplish alone. Even for autonomous and semiautonomous systems, teleoperation will be an important default mode. However, teleoperation can be a challenging task because the operator is remotely located. As a result, the operator's situation awareness of the remote environment can be compromised and the mission effectiveness can suffer. This paper presents a detailed examination of more than 150 papers covering human performance issues and suggested mitigation solutions. The paper summarizes the performance decrements caused by video images bandwidth, time lags, frame rates, lack of proprioception, frame of reference, two-dimensional views, attention switches, and motion effects. Suggested solutions and their limitations include stereoscopic displays, synthetic overlay, multimodal interfaces, and various predicative and decision support systems.

Human Performance Issues and User Interface Design for Teleoperated Robots

In the last decade, we have witnessed a drastic change in the form factor of audio and vision technologies, from heavy and grounded machines to lightweight devices that naturally fit our bodies. However, only recently, haptic systems have started to be designed with wearability in mind. The wearability of haptic systems enables novel forms of communication, cooperation, and integration between humans and machines. Wearable haptic interfaces are capable of communicating with the human wearers during their interaction with the environment they share, in a natural and yet private way. This paper presents a taxonomy and review of wearable haptic systems for the fingertip and the hand, focusing on those systems directly addressing wearability challenges. The paper also discusses the main technological and design challenges for the development of wearable haptic interfaces, and it reports on the future perspectives of the field. Finally, the paper includes two tables summarizing the characteristics and features of the most representative wearable haptic systems for the fingertip and the hand.

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Wearable Haptic Systems for the Fingertip and the Hand: Taxonomy, Review, and Perspectives

Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems 参加報告

Poultry are one of the most badly treated animals in the modern world. It has been shown that they have high levels of both cognition and feelings and as a result there has been a recent trend of promoting poultry welfare. There is also a tradition of keeping poultry as pets in some parts of the world. However, in modern cities and societies, it is often difficult to maintain contact with pets, particularly for office workers. We propose and describe a novel cybernetics system to use mobile and Internet technology to improve human–pet interaction. It can also be used for people who are allergic to touching animals and thus cannot stroke them directly. This interaction encompasses both visualization and tactile sensation of real objects.

A mobile pet wearable computer and mixed reality system for human–poultry interaction through the internet

We present the results of experiments to compare vibration and skin stretch in a virtual proprioception task in which subjects used a force sensor to control the movement of a virtual aim. Pilot experiments pointed to the need to provide the arm with varying dynamics (like a real arm) and to scale the feedback from vibratory and skin stretch displays to demonstrate a clear improvement in the accuracy of movement. For the final experiments, ten subjects were first trained on the system with visual feedback and then tested with vibratory feedback, skin stretch feedback and no feedback. Both vibration and skin stretch improved the subjects' performance. For some subjects, a second no-feedback case showed improvement over the initial case, indicating learning; in other cases, the no- feedback performance deteriorated and subjects reported that they had become used to relying on feedback. Overall, skin stretch provided superior results, particularly when the virtual arm was in a low-inertia configuration and at low velocity. The results suggest that small skin-stretch devices could be worn on the body to provide useful proprioceptive information when interacting with virtual environments and in motion training for rehabilitation or sports.

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Comparison of Skin Stretch and Vibrotactile Stimulation for Feedback of Proprioceptive Information

This paper describes and evaluates a high-fidelity, low-cost haptic interface for teleoperation. The interface is a wearable vibrotactile glove containing miniature voice coils that provides continuous, proportional force information to the user's fingertips. In psychophysical experiments, correlated variations in the frequency and amplitude of the stimulators extended the user's perceptual response range compared to varying amplitude or frequency alone. In an adaptive, force-limited, pick-and-place manipulation task, the interface allowed users to control the grip forces more effectively than no feedback or binary feedback, which produced equivalent performance. A sorting experiment established that proportional tactile feedback enhances the user's ability to discriminate the relative properties of objects, such as weight. We conclude that correlated amplitude and frequency signals, simulating force in a remote environment, substantially improve teleoperation.

Pradeep K. Khosla

Papers

Psychophysical characterization and testbed validation of a wearable vibrotactile glove for telemanipulation