Acoustic display for navigation in Internet-based teleoperation

When operating robots through the Internet, time delay and stability are two crucial issues. In this paper, we suggest that sound signal can be used to relay navigation information to the operator to substitute other sensory information such as two-dimensional vision and multidimensional force feedback. The rationale for using an acoustic interface is that it utilizes significantly less bandwidth than visual information, and it has higher stability compared with force feedback. A four-section psychological experiment was devised to investigate human teleoperation performance under different sensory feedback and evaluate the effectiveness of acoustic information. The preliminary tests results show that the human operator can sufficiently perceive the remote environment through audio feedback for remote teleoperation tasks.