Design and Evaluation of a Haptic Computer-Assistant for Telemanipulation Tasks

This paper introduces a computer-assisted teleoperation system, where the control over the teleoperator is shared between a human operator and computer assistance in order to improve the overall task performance. Two units, an action recognition and an assistance unit are introduced to provide context-specific assistance. The action recognition unit can evaluate haptic data, handle high sampling rates, and deal with human behavior changes caused by the actived haptic assistance. Repairing of a broken hard drive is selected as scenario and three different task-specific assistance functions are designed. The overall computer-assisted teleoperation system is evaluated in two steps: first, the performance of the action recognition unit is evaluated and then, the performance of the integrated computer-assisted teleoperation system is compared with an unassisted system by means of a user study with 15 participants. Overall action recognition rates of about 65% are achieved. Multivariate paired comparisons show that the computer-assisted teleoperation system significantly reduces the human effort and damage possibility compared with a teleoperation system without assistance.