Comparison of Haptic and Augmented Reality Visual Cues for Assisting Tele-manipulation

Robot teleoperation via human motion tracking has been proven to be easy to learn, intuitive to operate, and facilitate faster task execution than existing baselines. However, precise control while performing the dexterous tele-manipulation tasks is still a challenge. In this paper, we implement sensory augmentation in terms of haptic and augmented reality visual cues to represent four types of information critical to the precision and performance of a tele-manipulation task, namely: (1) target location; (2) constraint alert; (3) grasping affordance; and (4) grasp confirmation. We further conduct two user studies to investigate the effectiveness and preferred modality of the sensory feedback against no sensory support, and how the preference will be influenced by the different types of simulated real-world additional workload. We asked 8 participants to perform a general manipulation task using a KINOVA robotic arm. Our results indicate that: (1) the haptic and AR visual cues can significantly reduce the task completion time, occurrences of errors, the total length traversed by the robot end-effector, the operational effort while increasing the interface usability; (2) the haptic feedback trended in the direction of presenting the information that needs a prompt response, while the AR visual cues are suitable to monitor the system status; (3) the participants chose their preferred feedback with the purpose of reducing the cognitive workload despite increased extra effort.