Effects of Throughput Delay on Perception of Robot Teleoperation and Head Control Precision in Remote Monitoring Tasks

摘要

For robot teleoperators, replicating head motion in a remote environment is oftennecessary to complete monitoring and face-to-face service tasks. Especially in the caseof a stereoscopic camera rig, remote cameras need to be moved to match the operator’shead position and optical axes in order to interact with a remote entity, followtargets, or reorient.However,mechanical, computational, and network delay in suchteleoperation can cause intersensory conflict, perceptual deficits, and reduction inperformance, especially during activities that require head rotation. In this article,weevaluate the effects of view reconstruction on performance and perception for remotemonitoring tasks. To do so,we first implemented a panoramic reconstructionmethod to reduce perceived latency in a humanoid robot, which allows us to compareand contrast latency.Next,we designed a bidirectional remote control systemfor the robot and set up a series of experiments where participants had to conductfocused head control tasks through the perspective of the robot. This allowed us tocompare the effects of latency on head movement, accuracy, and subjective perceptionof the interface and remote teleoperation. Results showed that panoramic reconstructionsignificantly improved perception and comfort during teleoperation, but thatperformance only improved for tasks requiring slower head movements.