Effects of haptic feedback, stereoscopy, and image resolution on performance and presence in remote navigation

Traditionally, the main goal of teleoperation has been in successfully achieving a given task as if carrying out the task in the local space. An emerging and related requirement is to also match the subjective sensation or user experience of the remote environment while maintaining reasonable task performance. This concept is often called “presence” or “(experiential) telepresence,” which is informally defined as “the sense of being in a mediated environment.” In this paper, haptic feedback is considered as an important element to provide improved presence and reasonable task performance in remote navigation. An approach to use haptic information in “experientially” teleoperating a mobile robot is described. The haptic feedback is computed from the range information obtained by a sonar array attached to the robot, and is delivered to a user’s hand via a haptic probe. This haptic feedback is provided to the user in addition to stereoscopic images from a front-facing stereo camera mounted on the mobile robot. The experiment with a user population in a real environment showed that the haptic feedback significantly improved both task performance and user-felt presence. When considering user-felt presence, no interactions among haptic feedback, image resolution, and stereoscopy were observed, that is, the haptic feedback was effective regardless of the fidelity of the visual elements. The stereoscopic images also significantly improved both task performance and user-felt presence, but the high-resolution images significantly improved userfelt presence only. When considering task performance, however, it was found that there was an interaction between the haptic feedback and the stereoscopy, that is, the stereoscopic images were effective only when no force feedback was applied. According to the multiple regression analysis, the haptic feedback was a higher contributing factor to the improvement in performance and presence than the image resolution and the stereoscopy.