Usability Study of a Novel Triple-arm Mixed-Reality Robot Teleoperation System

Abstract

The usability of a novel triple-arm mixed-reality robot teleoperation system is investigated. The system is developed to provide a sense of remote presence for the operator. Different types of interfaces and camera setups have been proposed previously. Our novel approach is to have a moving stereo vision camera mounted on a robotic arm in the remote scene controlled with a virtual reality (VR) headset. By streaming live stereo video into the VR headset in a video see-through configuration the operator experiences a sense of remote presence. The teleoperation task is done using two more robotic arms. These arms are set up in a mirror teleoperation setting so that the remote (follower) arm copies the movements of the control (leader) arm. To investigate the effect of latency on the operator a within-subject usability study of the system with 20 participants has been conducted. Participants completed a pick-and-place task sorting objects into marked containers in two conditions. In one condition, the camera robot arm was controlled by a joint position controller with low latency but jittery robot motion. In the other condition, the camera robot was controlled by a joint velocity controller with higher latency but smooth motion. Participants completed the System Usability Scale questionnaire after each trial. The task completion time and participants' head movement were also recorded as objective measures. The study result did not show a significant difference in any of the objective or subjective measures, although, the position controller scored higher overall. This could be due to the number of participants or the ability of people to adapt to the latency in the system and further analysis in future work is required.