Telerobot Operators Can Account for Varying Transmission Dynamics in a Visuo-Haptic Object Tracking Task

Humans possess an innate ability to incorporate tools into our body schema to perform a myriad of tasks not possible with our natural limbs. Human-in-the-loop telerobotic systems (HiLTS) are tools that extend human manipulation capabilities to remote and virtual environments. Unlike most hand-held tools, however, HiLTS often possess complex elec- tromechanical architectures that introduce non-trivial trans- mission dynamics between the robot’s leader and follower, which alter or obfuscate the environment’s dynamics. While considerable research has focused on negating or circumventing these dynamics, it is not well understood how capable human operators are at incorporating these transmission dynamics into their sensorimotor control scheme. To begin answering this question, we recruited N=12 participants to use a novel reconfigurable teleoperator with varying transmission dynamics to perform a visuo-haptic tracking task. Contrary to our original hypothesis, our findings demonstrate that humans can account for substantial differences in teleoperator transmission dynamics and produce the compensatory strategies necessary to adequately control the teleoperator. These findings suggest that advances in transparency algorithms and haptic feedback approaches must be coupled with control designs that leverage the unique capabilities of the human operator in the loop.