Improving teleoperation: reducing mental rotations and translations

We consider teleoperation in which a slave manipulator, seen in one or more video images, is controlled by moving a master manipulandum. The operator must mentally transform (i.e., rotate, translate, scale, and/or deform) the desired motion of the slave image to determine the required motion at the master. Our goal is to make these mental transformations less taxing in order to decrease operator training time, improve task time/performance, and expand the pool of candidate operators. In this paper, we introduce a framework for describing the transformations required to use a particular teleoperation setup. We analyze in detail the mental transformations required in an interface consisting of one camera and display. We then expand our discussion to setups with multiple cameras/displays and discuss the results from an initial experiment.