Empirical Study of User Tele-operation of 5 DOF Manipulator

Abstract

Remote coordination between humans and robots has been of much interest over the past many years. In this thesis, we perform an empirical study regarding the comfort level of users in teleoperating a robotic manipulator to perform operations such as pick and place and stacking. We claim that such daily life operations while easy to perform by humans, are difficult to remotely operate using a manipulator due to their limited sensory perception. The problem is challenging because it requires optimum placement of cameras and an intuitive interface for the user to view and control the manipulator simultaneously. Hence, in our work, instead of limiting the control options, we give users the freedom to choose between controlling the manipulator using Cartesian Control and Joint Control, Joystick interface and also zoom in and out the various camera views for accurate visibility for pick and place and stacking tasks from a remote location. We validate our results by conducting the user trials on users with age between 21 and 63 from multiple countries. We observe that 71% of the users prefer using Cartesian space as the reference control, 57% feel the need for additional viewpoints for better visibility in first experiment which reduced to 29% in third experiment with different positioning of the same cameras, and more than 90% do not require the data from a distance sensor for guidance.