Kinesthetic and visual force display for telerobotics

Effectively controlling a robot remotely, teleoperation, offers benefits in improving human safety, reducing workload, providing location accessibility, and achieving convenient operation. In previous work, teleoperator task performance has been shown to improve with the addition of force feedback. Here we report on a system providing a human operator with a six-axis kinesthetic and visual force display, its implementation and experimental evaluation. A system design containing both a six-axis force reflective hand controller and a stereo video head-mounted display with 3D force display overlay is presented. The system was utilized to evaluate the effects of force display augmentation and substitution by controlling a dexterous anthropomorphic robot called "Robonaut" in the performance of a typical space teleoperation drill task. The human test subject performance under four different force feedback scenarios, no force display, visual force display, kinesthetic force display and bisensory force display, is measured. Experimental results indicate a noticeably lower cumulative force, torque, and variance, lower peak force/torque, yet unchanged task completion times under the presence of visual or kinesthetic force display.