Kinesthetic Compensation for Misalignment of Teleoperator Controls through Cross-modal Transfer of Movement Coordinates

When a teleoperation system’s remote image sensor is oriented so as to misalign the display coordinates in which the user must operate, control difficulties arise. Users then must learn to compensate for a rotational sensorimotor rearrangement. A new compensation technique is proposed in which the hand not used for control provides a kinesthetic cue to the rotation. In essence, the cueing hand provides a kinesthetic reference for the movement of the controlling hand. Users then make their control movements relative to their kinesthetic sense of the cueing hand’s orientation. Experiments show that this technique can reduce control disturbances for some misalignments by up to 64%.