Improving the Quality of Haptic Feedback Yields Only Marginal Improvements in Teleoperated Task Performance

In teleoperations, haptic feedback allows the human operator to touch the remote environment. Yet it is only partially understood to what extent the quality of haptic feedback contributes to human-in-the-loop task performance. This paper presents a human factors experiment in which telemanipulated task performance is assessed for three stages of haptic feedback: low-frequency haptic feedback, combined low- and high-frequency haptic feedback and a complete spectrum of haptic feedback in a manual equivalent of the task. Four generalized fundamental tasks have been defined, namely i) Free Air Movement Tasks, ii) Contact Transition Task, iii) Constrained Position Tasks and iv) Force Tasks, all of which identified in a single bolt-and-spanner task. The results show that the overall task performance is predominantly improved by providing low-frequency haptic feedback, especially in Constrained Position and Force Tasks. However, by further improving the quality of the haptic feedback, the task performance is only marginally increased.