Communication Modalities for Supervised Teleoperation in Highly Dexterous Tasks - Does one size fit all?
This work addresses teleoperation efficiency for surgical robotics, but it is incremental as it focuses on specific tasks and modalities.
The study investigated how communication modalities and supervision levels affect teleoperation performance in dexterous surgical tasks, finding that combining speech with action-level supervision improved efficiency and reduced errors, such as achieving a task completion time of 77.1 ± 3.4 seconds and dropping only 0.20 ± 0.17 pegs in peg transfer.
This study tries to explain the connection between communication modalities and levels of supervision in teleoperation during a dexterous task, like surgery. This concept is applied to two surgical related tasks: incision and peg transfer. It was found that as the complexity of the task escalates, the combination linking human supervision with a more expressive modality shows better performance than other combinations of modalities and control. More specifically, in the peg transfer task, the combination of speech modality and action level supervision achieves shorter task completion time (77.1 +- 3.4 s) with fewer mistakes (0.20 +- 0.17 pegs dropped).