Haptic Feedback in Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Teleoperation with Time Delay

In the teleoperation of an uninhabited aerial vehicle, haptic feedback can be used to provide useful information through the sense of touch. Although this can improve performance and enhance situation awareness, time delays caused by signal transmission generally induce control problems with haptic feedback, causing unsafe operations. Wave variables have been suggested to cope with the control problems in bilateral human-machine systems with time delay. Very little has been reported, however, on effects related to human control activity and workload when using wave variables. This paper describes a theoretical analysis of using wave variables to enhance a collision-avoidance system for visual and haptic uninhabited aerial vehicle teleoperation with time delay. An experiment was conducted to evaluate its effectiveness regarding operator performance, control activity, workload, and the safety of operation. Results indicate that wave variables are indeed successful in improving human performance. The number of collisions, operator control activity, and workload all decreased. Whereas performance and control activity were equivalent to the situation of haptic feedback without time delay, workload remained higher.