Complex Control Skills Acquisition Supported by Haptic Feedback

Proceedings of the 2008 Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation (ACRA '08), December 2008, Canberra, Australia

Felix Schill & Uwe R. Zimmer

This experiment explores the possibility to support the acquisition of complex physical control skills (e.g. balancing skills) by means of haptic feedback in the control interface. The actual physical control task is also perceived visually. This constitutes the common situation of remote controlling a complex, physical process while only visual feedback plus possibly a limited set of local measurements can be provided.

Two classes of haptic feedback are distinguished. First, haptic feedback reflecting the remote sensor measurement in a guiding form (negative feedback) is considered as a form of communicating the local situation. In the second class the forces which are supposed to be felt are reflected in the haptic controls (positive feedback). The effects of changing interface forces as well as preferences in groups of different levels of experience or age are investigated.

The hypothesis: "Human operators learn to remotely guide an acceleration controlled vehicle significantly faster and achieve higher accuracy, if vehicle-centric inertia data is provided via haptic feedback in the user interface. "

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