Evaluation of response models to a series of commands in a telerobotics supervisory control system

In contrast to direct manual control of manipulators, telerobotic interaction based on human supervisory control allows human operators to plan the movement of the remote machine by entering a series of commands as predefined positions. There are two possible kinds of response movements from executing this series of commands. Firstly, the robot moves towards the newly defined position immediately; or, secondly, the robot moves to achieve all the queued series of positions one by one. This paper describes an experiment to test the performance of the two kinds of response movements under varying visual feedback scenarios. By applying a mixed reality environment as the telerobotics interface, this experiment makes use of virtual objects to provide additional information for planning and monitoring the process. The highest productivity was achieved using a queue based model of interaction with additional visual cues. This was also compared to direct manual control and found to be considerably superior.