Effect of view distance and movement scale on haptic-based teleoperation of industrial robots in complex environments

This paper presents the study on the effect of view distance and movement scale on performance of haptic based teleoperation of a sandblasting robot in complex steel bridge maintenance environments. The operational performance, measured by the Index of Performance (IP), is defined based on the speed and the control accuracy of the manipulator. View distance (i.e. the distance between a display space and an object movement space) and movement scale between hand movement and manipulator movement, which are normally selected empirically, have significant effect the performance. In this paper, an experimental approach is used for determining view distance and movement scale. The sandblasting robotic system is used as an example industrial application in the experiments. Results of the experiments show a range of the view distance and the movement scale that can improve the performance of haptic-based teleoperation of industrial robots in complex environments.