An experimental study about the effect of interactions among functional factors in performance of telemanipulation systems

The complexity of telemanipulation systems has increased and thus there are a variety of elements and factors that affect the performance of these systems. An experimental study was done in this field to obtain information about the effect of several factors on the quality of tasks carried out by the system. Not only the effect of the factors has been considered but also the interactions among them. A taxonomy of functional factors was proposed to facilitate this study. The factors were divided into two principal groups: intrinsic and extrinsic factors. A factorial design was conducted with five factors: operator (with vs. without training), movement control (position vs. rate control), force feedback (kinesthetic vs. visual feedback), master bandwidth (high vs. low bandwidth) and task type (insertion vs. tracking movement). An open platform for experimentation with telerobotics systems (PLATERO) was developed to perform all the proposed experiments. Analyzed variables include completion time, SOSF (sum of squared forces), insertion forces and tracking error. Results show that there is a great deal of interaction between type of task and the other factors. This means that for each task there is a system configuration that obtains better performance. Another important finding shows that an expert operator is able to adapt to the different system configurations and obtain good results. However, a novice operator obtains better results with some factors than with others. Finally, in order to determine which system configuration obtains the highest task quality, the main task requirement must be defined, because the best system configuration depends on it.