Exploring Teleoperator Perception through Kinesthetic Feedback

Exploring Teleoperator Perception through Kinesthetic Feedback Background: Kinesthetic feedback is essential for effective teleoperation, enabling users to perceive and manipulate remote or virtual environments with precision. Haptic codecs exploit human perception thresholds to compress kinesthetic signals, reducing transmission load, but the resulting degradation —together with network-induced delay — may affect both perception and task performance. This work investigates how deadband-based compression and temporal delay jointly influence human performance in teleoperated tasks. Methods: Participants performed two teleoperated tasks under varying levels of deadband compression and network delay. In a letter tracing task, participants traced a reference shape while position and force errors were recorded. In a stiffness discrimination task, participants compared the stiffness of a test spring against soft and stiff reference springs and rated the test stimulus on a four-point scale. Preliminary Results: In the letter tracing task, tracing accuracy declined systematically and monotonically with both increasing compression and increasing delay, with position and force errors rising substantially across the tested parameter range and the largest degradation observed under combined high compression and delay. Degradation was gradual rather than abrupt, with no indication of a threshold beyond which performance broke down. In the stiffness discrimination task, perceived stiffness decreased with increasing delay, consistent with earlier reports. Compression level had no measurable effect on stiffness judgments. Preliminary Conclusion: Kinesthetic codecs enable effective teleoperation under time delay, but performance degrades with increasing compression and delay, and the two tasks showed distinct sensitivity profiles: error-based metrics in a fine motor tracing task were sensitive to both compression and delay, whereas comparative stiffness judgments were sensitive only to delay. These findings suggest that the impact of haptic signal compression and network delay on teleoperator performance is task-dependent, and that codec and network requirements should be tailored to the task at hand.