An Experimental Study of Haptic Feedback in a Teleoperated Assembly Task

Haptic feedback is known to improve teleoperation task performance for a number of tasks, and one important question is which haptic cues are the most important for each specific task. This research quantifies human performance in an assembly task for two types of haptic cues: low-frequency (LF) force feedback and high-frequency (HF) force feedback. A human subjects study was performed with those two main factors: LF force feedback on/off and HF force (acceleration) feedback on/off. All experiments were performed using a three degree-of-freedom teleoperator where the slave device has a low intrinsic stiffness, while the master device on the other hand is stiff. The results show that the LF haptic feedback reduces impact forces, but does not influence low-frequency contact forces or task completion time. The HF information did not improve task performance, but did reduce the mental load of the teleoperator, but only in combination with the LF feedback.