Selecting haptic guidance models in teleoperation: guidelines from a comparative user study
For teleoperation system designers, this work provides practical guidelines for selecting haptic guidance models based on environmental characteristics and real-time evaluation metrics.
This paper presents guidelines for selecting haptic guidance models in teleoperation based on a user study comparing spring-damper, potential field, and guiding tube models across six scenarios in a vertical farming task. Results show no universally superior model: spring-damper excels in cluttered environments, potential field in free spaces, and guiding tube offers a balanced compromise.
Haptic guidance in teleoperation enhances operator performance through force feedback. This paper presents guidelines to select the most appropriate model considering the task, the environment and the operator. We define a unified formulation expressing most common models (spring-damper, potential field, and guiding tube) as variations of a stiffness-damping system with model-specific guiding functions. We conducted a user study comparing the three classical models across six scenarios with varying environmental conditions in a vertical farming task. Results show no universally superior model: spring-damper excels in cluttered environments, potential field in free spaces (but it shows risks near obstacles), and guiding tube offers a balanced compromise. We propose novel objective metrics to evaluate the interaction, and show that guiding force magnitude correlates with comfort and trust scores. These findings provide practical model selection guidelines through environmental characteristics and real-time evaluation metrics.