Performance Measures for Bilateral Telemanipulation

Abstract

Bilateral telemanipulation studies designed for the purpose of testing and evaluating communication channel control approaches are predisposed to the respective varying conditions of the study and their reproducibility is often limited. This thesis presents a performance measure framework, a teleoperation evaluation suite for evaluating and comparing novel control approaches which shall bring awareness to standardize evaluation methods for teleoperation. To account for the wide variety of existing control approaches and performance measures, an extensive literature review was conducted to determine the requirements for such a framework. This framework contains a virtual operator and a virtual environment to eliminate highly varying factors. Real haptic devices are used in the experiment so that non-deterministic effects and uncertainties are not neglected. For the simulation and experiment, the performance is measured for one specific human arm impedance during free motion and wall contact. The root-mean-square tracking errors of the positions, velocities and forces are used to compare the control approaches TDPA and wave variables within the positionforce and velocity-force domain. A pilot study with six participants was conducted with the aim to compare the control approaches for various conditions regarding the tracking performance and quality of teleoperation. The experiments and pilot study results showed good alignment with the simulation results regarding the performance evaluation of both control approaches, TDPAs performance degradation with time delay and the behavior of the wave variables approach for various wave impedances b.