Kinesthetic compensation for rotational misalignment of camers used for teleoperation

Kinesthetic feedback was shown to significantly improve the accuracy of teleoperations subject to rotational misalignments between the image source and the operator even without explicit training. Rotational misalignments are often encountered in teleoperation and telerobotics when a remote image sensor (usually a camera) is oriented so that the resulting display coordinates are rotated with respect to the coordinates in which the user is operating. In the past, users have had to learn to compensate for this misalignment through practice, camera adjustment, or the use of multiple camera images. A new compensation technique is proposed in which the hand not used for control is utilized to provide a kinesthetic cue to the camera orientation. This cue greatly reduces the difficulty operators have had in compensating for control-display misalignment. The cueing hand, which is positioned to copy the attitude of the viewing camera, provides a kinesthetic reference for the movement of other hand, which controls the teleoperated system. This enables users to make control movements relative to their kinesthetic sense of the orientation of their own (cueing) hand.