Skill Acquisition and Task Performance in Teleoperation Using Monoscopic and Stereoscopic Video Remote Viewing

There are many tasks hazardous to human life which can be accomplished remotely through telerobotic control. Robot technology has advanced to the stage where teleoperated manipulators are versatile and effective enough to be used successfully in a wide variety of circumstances. As telerobotic systems become more sophisticated, it is important to ensure that the human-machine interface is adequate for the task. One very important type of feedback information that is missing from standard telerobotic control stations is the immediate and compelling binocular coding of depth, which is thwarted through the use of standard monoscopic (“2D”) video systems, making the operator dependent on other less salient visual depth cues. This is unfortunate, since most telemanipulation tasks require operators to have a good sense of the relative locations of objects in the remote world. To that end, a practical Stereoscopic Video (SV) system was developed that is compatible with standard video display and recording equipment. An experiment was conducted to examine the potential benefits of SV for teleoperation. The results showed that SV can aid teleoperation by reducing task execution times, reducing error rates, and reducing the time needed for training.