Preliminary Evaluation of an Orbital Camera for Teleoperation of Remote Manipulators

Conventional teleoperative interfaces, used for remote manipulation in the nuclear industry, utilise multiple stationary CCTV cameras for situational awareness. This is cognitively challenging for the human operator, who must mentally combine information from multiple 2D views, before attempting 3D reasoning about the remote environment. To enhance performance on telemanipulation tasks, this paper explores the merits of employing an orbital camera view. The orbital camera's gaze direction is automatically fixated towards the robot's moving end-effector. Meanwhile, the camera can be controlled by the operator to move on a spherical surface around the end-effector, in addition to zooming capability. The robot's Cartesian motion coordinates are also continuously transformed to be controllable with respect to the axes of the orbital camera view. Human test-subject experiments were conducted in a simulation environment using novice robot operators, and a variety of metrics were collected. Although the results do not show an objective difference between the camera modes, participant interviews suggest the orbital camera is the preferred method for visual feedback with its dynamic views helping to overcome positioning difficulties associated with stationary cameras. The experiment also revealed significant confounding factors that contributed to the results being inconclusive. These are discussed and recommendations are made for future empirical experiments to evaluate such systems.