| Effectively controlling a robot remotely to perform a desired task—teleoperation—offers benefits in improving human safety, reducing workload, providing location accessibility, and in convenience. Because these benefits become more evident under the extreme environmental conditions of space operations, NASA Johnson Space Center has been actively researching the usage of and improvements in teleoperations. Teleoperator task performance has been shown to improve with the addition of sensory feedback. In particular, providing force-feedback to a human operator, has been shown to decrease task completion times and lessen potentially damaging contact forces between the slave robot and its target work environment. We summarize the design, development, and usage of a human interface system built to provide position control as well as both kinesthetic and visual six-axis force-feedback displays to a human teleoperator of a remote manipulator.; The system developed is utilized as an experimentation platform evaluating the merit of providing force feedback through both kinesthetic (muscular position and force) and substituted visual displays on a typical space operations task utilizing an anthropomorphic slave robot called “Robonaut”. Teleoperator performance of a drill task is measured under four different display scenarios: no force display, visual force display, kinesthetic, and both. Task completion times and contact forces are measured, and subjective questionnaire responses collected. Our results indicate lower maximum force/torque, lower cumulative force/torque, and a greater task consistency with any type of feedback, with no significant differences in task completion time.; Cumulative force/torque was reduced between 46–51% with visually substituted force feedback, 69–81% with kinesthetic feedback and 63–92% with both forms of feedback. Maximum force/torque variance between subjects was reduced between 61–90% with any type of force display, indicating improved consistency. Maximum contact force/torque was reduced 23% in the visual case, and between 27–43% for kinesthetic and both cases. |
