SUMMARY

Various roles for operators in human-machine systems have been proposed. The proposed research hypothesizes that underlying all of these views is the law that operators perform best when given feedback of the same type as their intent. To test the hypothesis, operator performance with position control, rate control, and position control with the ghost arm will be measured to see if giving position feedback will demonstrate its advantage over rate control and explain the previously found advantage of rate control. Past studies have shown that position control is superior to rate control except when operating large-workspace and/or low-bandwidth manipulators and for tracking tasks. Operators of large-workspace and/or low-bandwidth manipulators do not receive immediate position feedback. To remedy this, a ghost arm overlay will be displayed for them. Operators will also perform different tasks (point-to-point motion, tracking, path following, etc.) with different controllers (position control, velocity control) under different task conditions (obstacles, bandwidth of the machine, etc.) to measure how different task factors influence the operator’s intent. The feasibility of using a ghost arm for teleoperation will be investigated by displaying the arm with 3DTV technology. Unlike previous work, this research will compare the fuel efficiencies of different HMIs as well as time efficiencies.