Evaluation of haptic feedback cues on vehicle teleoperation performance in an obstacle avoidance scenario

Teleoperation of an unmanned vehicle is a challenging task for human operators especially when the vehicle is not within line of sight. Lack of situational awareness and increased workload due to limited perception channels result in degraded task performance. If these teleoperation missions are human-critical then it becomes more important to improve the operator performance by decreasing workload and improving situational awareness. In this paper, a new teleoperation interface which provides force feedback based on the path generated by an obstacle avoidance algorithm is presented. The purpose of this interface is to overcome the difficulties imposed by limited field of view and lack of situational awareness. Teleoperation tests are performed to verify that haptic feedback generated from the dynamic obstacle information of the environment improves teleoperation performance by supporting the operator and decreasing the workload.