A User-Based Testing Procedure for a Telemanipulation System

We have developed a system to telemanipulate a robotic arm through a digital glove. In essence, a manipulation scheme has been designed to connect both components. Such manipulation scheme was developed to translate each gesture coming from the glove, into a valid command to the robotic arm. This scheme is believe to be friendly and functional because only natural gestures are required from the operator. A master-slave model is used to communicate the local station and the remote station. The communication technique is based on sockets using the object-oriented programming language Microsoft Visual C⁺⁺. In this paper, we present preliminary results over a user-based testing procedure applied onto our telemanipulation system [3]. Particularly, we are evaluating two usability specifications, namely performance and preference measures. Results from our experiments indicate that 71% of the users in our sample of 32 people were able to successfully complete their assigned tasks and all of them perceived our system easy to use.