Motion feedback improves performance in teleoperating UAVs

Teleoperation of a remote vehicle is challenging, due to on-board sensing, the transmission to the control station, and the display of information to the operator in an informative way. In an effort to increase the situational awareness of the operator we included physical motion feedback in addition to visual feedback. In this study we investigated the effects of motion feedback on operator performance in teleoperation hover tasks. An experiment was conducted where we systematically varied the scaling of the motion feedback and measured the performance and control stick activity of participants controlling a simulated remote vehicle in a virtual environment. Simulated lateral wind disturbances acted on the remote vehicle, forcing participants to constantly correct the position. Our results show increased performance and stick activity in conditions that include motion feedback. Based on the results, we conclude that providing motion feedback allows the operator to reject external disturbances more effectively, resulting in the increased performance.