Augmented Human-Machine Interface: Providing a Novel Haptic Cueing to the Tele-Operator

The sense of telepresence is very important in teleoperation environments in which the operator is physically separated from the vehicle. Extending the visual interface to a multi-sensory interface could allow the teleoperator to better perceive information of the environment and its constraints. The use of force feedback would complement the visual information through the sense of touch. This paper focuses on a novel concept of haptic cueing developed in order to optimize the performance of a teleoperator and to improve the human-machine interfaces. A first experiment showed the effectiveness of the newly developed haptic cueing, the Indirect Haptic Aiding, with respect to visual cueing only. In a second experiment, we compared the IHA to an existing haptic concept, the Direct Haptic Aiding. The problem of wind gust rejection in Remotely Piloted Vehicles is used as test bench. The results show the effectiveness of both methods but a better performance of the IHA-based system for pilots without any previous training about the haptic aids. DHA-based system provided instead better results after some pilot training on the experiment. Pilots reported better sensation of the wind gusts with IHA-based feedback. The two haptic aids concepts are going to be compared in an obstacle detection/avoidance task.