Analytical and Psychophysical Comparison of Bilateral Teleoperators for Enhanced Perceptual Performance

This paper focuses on the human perception capabilities for haptic interaction with remote environments. The perception capabilities are compared for two well-known control methods with two kinds of haptic cues. Analytical and psychophysical methods are used to analyze the performance. The first control method aims at maximizing the transparency of the remote interactions (i.e., transparency-based method), whereas the second one aims at maximizing the detection and discrimination abilities of the human operator (i.e., perception-based method). For each of these two control methods, two kinds of haptic cues are studied, which use position and force cues from remote environments. Hybrid matrix formulation is employed, and it is analyzed in the frequency domain for these studies. Psychophysical experiments are then conducted for human-centered evaluation and comparison of the control methods. Analytical and experimental results clearly show that the perception-based method, when compared with the transparency-based method, enhances the human operator's perceptual capabilities of remote environments irrespective of force cues. For each of the two control methods, the force cues always contribute more to the increase in perceptual sensitivity when compared with the case of position cues.