Robotic teleoperation is used in various applications, including the nuclear industry, where the experience and intelligence of a human operator are necessary for making complex decisions that are beyond the autonomy of robots. Human-robot interfaces that help strengthen an operators situational awareness without inducing excessive cognitive load are crucial to the success of teleoperation. This paper presents a novel visual interface that allows operators to simultaneously control a 6-DoF camera platform and a robotic manipulator whilst experiencing the remote environment through a virtual reality head-mounted display (HMD). The proposed system, Orbital Head-Mounted Display (OHMD), utilizes head rotation tracking to command camera movement in azimuth and elevation directions around a fixation point located at a robot's end-effector. A human factor study was conducted to compare the interface acceptance, perceived workload, and task performance of OHMD with a conventional interface utilizing multiple fixed cameras (Array) and a standard head-mounted display implementation (HMD). Results show that both the OHMD and HMD interfaces significantly improve task performance, reduce perceived workload and increase interface acceptance compared to the Array interface. Participants reported they preferred OHMD due to the increased assistance and freedom in viewpoint selection. Whilst OHMD excelled in usefulness, the standard HMD interface allowed operators to perform robotic welding tasks significantly faster.@en

Unlike many traditional stiff position-controlled robots, new collaborative robots interact with humans and operate in an environment that is often unpredictable and unknown. For safe and effective executions of manipulation tasks within such an environment, the robot requires to modulate its compliance. Therefore, the human operator must have a system that enables an intuitive demonstration of compliance skills to the robot. Ideally, this should also be possible through teleoperation in order to have the ability to demonstrate skills at a distance, such as in remote home care applications or any other scenario where the skilled operators are not physically present all the time. Existing state-of-the-art methods for remote demonstration of impedance skills only enable limited modulation of the stiffness matrix, or they are too complex and cumbersome for practical applications. This research tries to overcome these limitations and proposes a teleoperated stiffness commanding method that enables a complete modulation of the stiffness matrix in 3 degrees of freedom. The method uses the same haptic device hardware as used for controlling the robot manipulator motion, hence it does not require extra specialised equipment for stiffness commands. By wiggling the endpoint of the haptic device, the stiffness is commanded to the robot and also fed back to the operator through haptic and visual feedback. To evaluate the performance and acceptance of the system, we performed a user study where the participants had to demonstrate various interaction behaviour to the remote robot. The results show how varying system parameters (i.e., degrees of freedom, orientation, and size of the stiffness commands) influence the performance of the system and user acceptance.@en