Visual feedback techniques for telemanipulation and system status sensualization

Abstract

A general effort in telemanipulation is to establish as many and as high quality sensory channels as possible between the human operator and the remote site. However, most of the tasks require only a portion of human sensory skills, typically - besides visual information - kinesthetic, haptic and tactile force-feedback. But realizing teleoperators providing transparent force-feedback over a long distance is still a challenge because of the low bandwidth, varying network delay and the probably unknown remote environment. Therefore, the senses that are not necessary for controlling the process should be used to support the operator to enhance or substitute the force feedback. In system status sensualization the goal is to provide an interpretation of sensory information that can be easily and effectively perceived by the operator. However, traditional analogous or digital instrumentation requires that the operator directs his sight right to the instrument to read the values. Furthermore, these values are usually important only if they are in an abnormal state. In case of a quite complex system (an airplane or a power plant) this process is very time-consuming and often needs several operators. In this paper we propose new visualization methods using peripheral vision to transmit visual information matched to the capabilities of the human visual system. The novel method could be applied for both sensory substitution and system status sensualization. The theoretical background of this work is a mathematical model of the human photopic contrast sensitivity proposed by the authors in a previous work. The novel visualization methods are analyzed experimentally via comparative tests.