Preliminary experiments of kinesthetic exploration in a 6 DOF teleoperation system

A teleoperation system with kinesthetic feedback can provide operators with information so that they can make proper judgments as if they were in direct contact with the slave robot work environment. This paper presents the idea of testing the same haptics exploration tasks in both direct and teleoperation scenarios. This provides the advantage that lessons learned in experimental psychology can be used for future teleoperation systems´ control and hardware design. One preliminary experiment is presented in this paper to demonstrate the concept. This experiment comprised of three sets of weight perception tasks. One set of direct hand exploration experiments were carried out first. Two sets of teleoperator based experiments, one with a basic two channel controller and the other with three channel controllers, were used to replicate the same set of experiments. Results from the experiments were compared and analyzed.