Evaluation of Immersive Teleoperation Systems using Standardized Tasks and Measurements

Despite advances regarding autonomous functionality for robots, teleoperation remains a means for performing delicate tasks in safety critical contexts like explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) and ambiguous environments. Immersive stereoscopic displays have been proposed and developed in this regard, but bring about their own specific problems, e...

Human-Robot Interaction During Virtual Reality Mediated Teleoperation: How Environment Information Affects Spatial Task Performance and Operator Situation Awareness

Virtual Reality (VR) mediated teleoperation is a relatively new field in robotics which means little is known about the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of environmental information presentation on Human-Robot Team (HRT) task performance and operator Situation Awareness (oSA). Method. The...

Towards a test battery to benchmark dexterous performance in teleoperated systems

A high level of dexterity is becoming increasingly important for teleoperated inspection, maintenance and repair robots. A standard test to benchmark system dexterity can advance the design, quantify possible improvements, and increase the effectiveness of such systems. Because of the wide variety of tasks and application domains ranging from...

Investigation of optical turbulence from an unmanned aerial system

Wave propagation of electro-optical systems, lasers or imaging depends on the state of the atmosphere their beams are passing through. Fluctuations in the refractive index of air are responsible for signal attenuation and image degradation. This atmospheric effect is called optical turbulence and its strength is quantified by the structure...

Gesture recognition with a low power FMCW radar and a deep convolutional neural network

Gesture recognition with radar enables remote control of consumer devices such as audio equipment, television sets and gaming consoles. In this paper, experimental results of hand gesture recognition with a low power FMCW radar and a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) are presented. The FMCW radar operates in the 24 GHz ISM frequency band...

Remote management of non-TR-069 UPnP end-user devices in a private network

End-to - end broadband service delivery requires remote management of devices in the home network, beyond the home gateway (HG). The service provider can only put limited requirements to these of-the-shelf devices, and therefore has to make intelligent use of their given control and management protocols. We developed a demonstrator for the...

Applying principles of Design For Assembly to ITER maintenance operations

In ITER, maintenance operations in the vessel and in the Hot Cell will be largely done by Remote Handling (RH). Remotely performed maintenance actions tend to be more time-costly than actions performed by direct human access. With a human operator in the control loop and adequate situational feedback, a two-armed master slave manipulator system...

Remote discovery and management of end-user devices in heterogeneous private networks

End-to-end broadband service delivery requires remote management of devices in the home network, beyond the home gateway (HG). The service provider can only put limited requirements to these of-the-shelf devices, and therefore has to make intelligent use of their given control and management protocols. The authors propose architectures for the...

Maintenance implications of critical components in ITER CXRS upper port plug design

Already in the early phase of a design for ITER, the maintenance aspects should be taken into account, since they might have serious implications. This paper presents the arguments in support of the case for the maintainability of the design, notably if this maintenance is to be performed by advanced remote methods. This structure is compliant...

Analysis of the ITER ECH Upper Port Launcher remote maintenance using virtual reality

All ITER sub-systems of remote handling (RH) classes 1 and 2 have to be remotely maintainable. The maintenance strategy for these components has to ensure system availability after failure or scheduled maintenance. This paper shows how virtual reality (VR) simulation [1] can be used as a tool to analyze the maintenance process, to predict the...

Vibrotactile spatial acuity on the torso: Effects of location and timingparameters

The processing of spatio-temporal vibrotactile patterns by the torso was examined in two experiments. The first investigated the spatial acuity as function of location on the torso. A uniform acuity between 2 and 3 cm was found, except on the body midline where acuity was about 1 cm. This favorable effect was hypothesized to be caused by...

An exploratory study on crew action as a precondition to use remote experts for preventing ship disasters

Presenting directions with a vibrotactile torso display

Vibrotactile displays covering the torso present spatial information in an intuitive way since the stimuli are directly mapped to the body coordinates; left is left, front is front, etc. The present study investigated the direction in the horizontal plane to which a specific torso location is mapped using a 15 tactor linear display. Participants...

Control performance with three translational degrees of freedom

For multiple DOF systems, it is important to detemine how accurately operators can control each DOF, and what the influence of the perceptual, information processing and psychomotor components on performance is. Sixteen right-handed male students participated in 2 experiments: one involving positioning and one involving tracking with 3...

Trade-offs between spatial and temporal resolution in driving unmanned vehicles

Remote vision for steering unmanned vehicles is generally facilitated by on-board cameras. Due to limited bandwidth data-links, a trade-off exists between spatial and temporal image resolution. In the present experiment, objective performance of military driving instructors was measured on a standardized task-battery in a fixed-base driving...

RPV research simulator [RPV research simulator]

According to the new mission of the Royal Netherlands Army, supervision and peacekeeping operations in unknown areas and areas of difficult access become increasingly prominent. In this connection, it is supposed that because of the huge number of potential applications and the rapid technological developments in the area of semi-autonomous...