Bilateral teleoperation - Human operator centered approach

Bilateral teleoperation provides human operators with the ability to manipulate and receive force feedback from distant objects. Teleoperation is applied in various areas such as space robotics, handling hazardous materials, and surgery. Using teleoperated robots in space exploration reduces costs of assembly, maintenance, and repair tasks, as well as the risk that accompanies extra vehicular activity by astronauts. Reliable and transparent feedback is important in space tasks due to their complexity. In measuring transparency it is important to consider how the human perception and action are affected by teleoperation. In this paper we review our findings about the effect of delay on human perception and action: subjects tend to overestimate the stiffness of elastic fields due to delay; this effect changes with probing strategy and with the joint that is used for probing; declarative and motor-related perception of stiffness are inconsistent. Based on these findings we proposed a multidimensional measure of transparency which takes into account perceptual, local motor, and remote transparency. We name the process of minimizing the perceptual transparencey as well as the remote transparencey - transparentizing. We present our human-operator centered transparentizing approach and discuss its potential application to teleoperation in space exploration.