Preliminary Evaluation of an Orbital Camera for Teleoperation of Remote Manipulators Conventional teleoperative interfaces, used for remote manipulation in the nuclear industry, utilise multiple stationary CCTV cameras for situational awareness. This is cognitively challenging for the human operator, who must mentally combine information from multiple 2D views, before attempting 3D reasoning about the remote environment. To enhance performance on telemanipulation tasks, this paper explores the merits of employing an orbital camera view. The orbital cameraxe2x80x99s gaze direction is automatically fixated towards the robotxe2x80x99s moving endeffector. Meanwhile, the camera can be controlled by the operator to move on a spherical surface around the endeffector, in addition to zooming capability. The robotxe2x80x99s Cartesian motion coordinates are also continuously transformed to be controllable with respect to the axes of the orbital camera view. Human testsubject experiments were conducted in a simulation environment using novice robot operators, and a variety of metrics were collected. Although the results do not show an objective difference between the camera modes, participant interviews suggest the orbital camera is the preferred method for visual feedback with its dynamic views helping to overcome positioning difficulties associated with stationary cameras. The experiment also revealed significant confounding factors that contributed to the results being inconclusive. These are discussed and recommendations are made for future empirical experiments to evaluate such systems.

An Intuitive, Affordances Oriented Telemanipulation Framework for a Dual Robot Arm Hand System: On the Execution of Bimanual Tasks The concept of teleoperation has been studied since the advent of robotics and has found use in a wide range of applications, including exploration of remote or dangerous environments (e.g., space missions, disaster management), telepresence based time optimisation (e.g., remote surgery) and robot learning. While a significant amount of research has been invested into the field, intricate manipulation tasks still remain challenging from the user perspective due to control complexity. In this paper, we propose an intuitive, affordances oriented telemanipulation framework for a dual robot arm hand system. An object recognition module is utilised to extract scene information and provide grasping and manipulation assistance to the user, simplifying the control of adaptive, multifingered hands through a commercial Virtual Reality (VR) interface. The systemxe2x80x99s performance was experimentally validated in a remote operation setting, where the user successfully performed a set of bimanual manipulation tasks.