Haptic Assistance is a Promising Method to Support Operators of a Hunting Simulator for Training Lions

Abstract

At the Lion Foundation a hunting simulator is used to stimulate the hunting instincts and skills of lions and tigers, in order to improve their health and increase chances of relocation into the wild. The hunting simulator is an animal enclosure wherein a piece of meat, used as prey, is moved by means of a joystick-controlled cable-driven system. The animal caretakers find it difficult to operate the hunting simulator effectively: the position of the prey relative to the hunting cat and enclosure is hard to judge. Evading the fast unpredictable cats requires high prey velocities without crashing into obstacles or enclosure walls. In this study it is hypothesized that providing the operators with haptic assistance through the joystick will help them to improve their performance, i.e. it will allow them to navigate the prey through the enclosure at higher velocities while having fewer collisions. Haptic assistance was designed as a force-stiffness feedback algorithm based on the inverse Time-to-Collision. It was implemented on a purposefully designed virtual hunting simulator operated through a force-feedback gaming joystick. Naive subjects (n=10) participated in an experiment in which they were asked to navigate the virtual prey through a series of waypoints, without hitting the boundaries of the virtual enclosure or the obstacles within it, both with and without the designed haptic assistance. Results show that haptic assistance leads to significant benefits for the operators, as they moved significantly faster while having significantly fewer collisions. In conclusion, the designed haptic assistance is beneficial when used in the virtual hunting simulator, and therefore constitutes a promising method that warrants implementation and evaluation in the real- world hunting simulator.