Exploring the Effects of Control Frames and Views in Teleoperation

Teleoperation extends a human operator's perceptual and manipulative capabilities in remote environments. However, the interaction effects between control frames and views are not well understood, which limits the effectiveness of teleoperation system design. This study presents a <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$2 \times 2$</tex> mixed factorial experiment as a preliminary investigation into how control frames and views influence directional judgment in robot teleoperation. In the experiment, participants controlled the translational and rotational movements of a robotic arm displayed on a screen using a controller. Both objective and subjective measures were collected, including task performance, eye movement, cognitive workload, and overall usability. The results indicated that performance declined when participants used a control frame involving spatial relationship interpretation at the remote site while relying only on local information from the view. Usability scores indicated that participants preferred a control frame that required less mental transformation and a broader view for teleoperation. However, relying only on a local-information view increased cognitive workload. These findings may provide insights for designing user interfaces for teleoperation systems.