Remote manipulation with transmission delay

The effect on the performance of both simple and complex tasks of inserting transmission delay between the master and slave elements of a remote manipulator was studied. Most operators spontaneously adopted an effective “move-and-wait” strategy to cope with delay. A modification of a method proposed earlier enabled task-completion time to be accurately predicted from data taken when there was no delay. With the move-and-wait strategy, completion time depends on the length of sequences of open-loop movements. The number of such moves for positioning in one dimension as a function of task difficulty was found to agree with that predicted by a simple statistical model.