Haptic feedback cues can improve human perceptual awareness in multi-robots teleoperation

The availability of additional force cues in haptic devices are often expected to improve control performance, over conditions that only provide visual feedback. However, there is little empirical evidence to show this to be true for the teleoperation control of remote vehicles (i.e., multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)). In this paper, we show that force cues can increase one's sensitivity in discerning the presence of obstacles in the remote multi-UAVs' environment. Significant benefits, relative to a purely visual scenario, were achieved only when force cues were sufficiently amplified by large gains. In addition, force cues tended to provide stronger benefits when they were based on the UAVs' velocity information.