Telerobotics: Display, control, and communication problems

An experimental telerobotics (TR) simulation is described suitable for studying human operator (HO) performance. Simple manipulator pick-and-place and tracking tasks allowed quantitative comparison of a number of calligraphic display viewing conditions. An enhanced perspective display was effective with a reference line from target to base, with or without a complex three-dimensional grid framing the view. This was true especially if geometrical display parameters such as azimuth (AZ) and elevation (EL) were arranged to be near optimal. Quantitative comparisons were made possible utilizing control performance measures such as root mean square error (rmse). There was a distinct preference for controlling the manipulator in end-effector Cartesian space for our primitive pick-and-place task, rather than controlling joint angles and then, via direct kinematics, the end-effector position. An introduced communication delay was found to produce decrease in performance. In considerable part, this difficulty could be compensated for by preview control information. That neurological control of normal human movement contains a sampled data period of 0.2 s may relate to this robustness of HO control to delay.