The Influence of Teleoperator Stiffness and Damping on Object Discrimination

Human task performance using teleoperator systems depends on the physical and controlled parameters of the system. Two teleoperated grasping tasks-size and stiffness discrimination-were studied to investigate how changes in system parameters influence human capabilities. The device characteristics altered were teleoperator stiffness (size and stiffness discrimination) and teleoperator damping (size discrimination only). It was found that neither teleoperator stiffness nor teleoperator damping influenced size discrimination. Also, teleoperator stiffness did not influence stiffness discrimination. Furthermore, teleoperated performance was compared with direct interaction using bare hands or with the fingers in a bracket. Size discrimination performance was equivalent for these three conditions, but stiffness discrimination performance was lower for teleoperation than for direct interaction.