Effects of haptic feedback, stereoscopy, and image resolution on performance and presence in remote navigation
Traditionally, the main goal of teleoperation has been to successfully achieve a given task as if performing the task in local space. An emerging and related requirement is to also match the subjective sensation or the user experience of the remote environment, while maintaining reasonable task performance. This concept is often called presence or (experiential) telepresence, which is informally defined as the sense of being in a mediated environment. In this paper, haptic feedback is considered as an important element for providing improved presence and reasonable task performance in remote navigation. An approach for using haptic information to experientially teleoperate a mobile robot is described. Haptic feedback is computed from the range information obtained by a sonar array attached to the robot, and delivered to a user's hand via a haptic probe. This haptic feedback is provided to the user, in addition to stereoscopic images from a forward-facing stereo camera mounted on the mobile robot. The experiment with a user population in a real-world environment showed that haptic feedback significantly improved both task performance and user-felt presence. When considering user-felt presence, no interaction among haptic feedback, image resolution, and stereoscopy was observed, that is, haptic feedback was effective, regardless of the fidelity of visual elements. Stereoscopic images also significantly improved both task performance and user-felt presence, but high-resolution images only significantly improved user-felt presence. When considering task performance, however, it was found that there was an interaction between haptic feedback and stereoscopy, that is, stereoscopic images were only effective when no force feedback was applied. According to the multiple regression analysis, haptic feedback was a higher contributing factor to the improvement in performance and presence than image resolution and stereoscopy.
haptic feedback presence remote navigation teleoperation telepresence mobile robot user study