Visual enhancements in pick-and-place tasks: Human operators controlling a simulated cylindrical manipulator

A visual display system serves as an important man-machine interface for efficient teleoperations. However, careful consideration is necessary to display three-dimensional information on a two-dimensional screen effectively. A teleoperation simulator is constructed with a vector display system, joysticks, and a simulated cylindrical manipulator to evaluate various display conditions quantitatively. Pick-and-place tasks are performed, and mean completion times are used as a performance measure. Two experiments are performed. First, effects of variation of perspective parameters on human operator's pick-and-place performance with monoscopic perspective display are investigated. Then visual enhancements of monoscopic perspective display by adding a grid and reference lines are investigated and compared with visual enhancements of stereoscopic display. The results indicate that stereoscopic display does generally permit superior pick-and-place performance, while monoscopic display can allow equivalent performance when it is defined with appropriate perspective parameter values and provided with adequate visual enhancements. Mean completion time results of pick-and-place experiments for various display conditions shown are observed to be quite similar to the normalized rms error results of mannal tracking experiments reported previously.