Teleoperation with Force Feedback: Easing Unmanned Vehicles Operation in Unknown Scenarios

This work presents a solution for teleoperation of unmanned vehicles in unknown scenarios with increased transparency and safety. The proposed solution includes the implementation of a novel vibration feedback, resulting in an increased awareness of the vehicle surroundings and operators comfort. Furthermore, two newly developed anti-collision methods that take into account both vehicle and environment constraints are applied. The proposed solution was tested and validated by 28 subjects teleoperating an omnidirectional ground vehicle through an unseen maze and afterwards by 46 subjects using a virtual quadcopter in a 3D environment. Experimental results show a decrease in task workload and completion time when using the proposed scheme. Furthermore, the vibration feedback was compared with other haptic feedbacks in an experiment where users had to identify the direction of a single obstacle. The existing feedback solutions were outperformed both in preciseness and celerity.