On the subjective difficulty of Joystick-based robot arm teleoperation with auditory feedback

Joystick-based teleoperation is a dominant method for remotely controlling various types of robots, such as excavators, cranes, and space telerobotics. Our ultimate goal is to create effective methods for training and assessing human operators of joystick-controlled robots. Towards that goal, in this paper we present an extensive study consisting of 18 experimental subjects controlling a simulated robot, using either no feedback or auditory feedback. Multiple observables were recorded, including not only joystick and robot angles and timings, but also subjective measures of difficulty, personality and usability data, and automated analysis of facial expressions and blink rate of the subjects. Our initial results indicate that: First, that the subjective difficulty of teleoperation with auditory feedback has smaller variance as compared to teleoperation without feedback, and second, that the subjective difficulty of a task is linearly related with the logarithm of task completion time. We conclude with a forward-looking discussion including future steps.