Kaber receives NSF grant
December 13, 1998
The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded Dr. David Kaber a Faculty Early Career Development grant to pursue research into the concept of telepresence in teleoperations. The $465,000 award is to be dispersed across a four-year period and involves investigation of the sensation of being present in a remote environment while controlling a remote robotic manipulator. This sensation, or telepresence, has been identified as a design ideal for teleoperators. Therefore, if system engineers can encourage in human operators the sense of being present in a remote robot task environment through design of human-machine interfaces including displays and hand-controllers, system performance will be optimized.
The NSF research program is intended to identify the technological and psychological origins of telepresence; to describe the relationship between teleoperator performance and telepresence; and to develop a comprehensive model of the concept to be used for design purposes. Experimental investigations are to be conducted by the newly formed MSU Telepresence Research Team on the influence of teleoperation system configurations and human factors in telepresence experiences. Industrial Engineering (IE) graduate and undergraduate research assistants, including Jennifer Riley, Dezhen Song, Rong Zhou and Judy Liaw, will subjectively assess research subject’ perceptions of telepresence in simulated teleoperation applications by using established presence query techniques.
Newly acquired high-end graphics-visualization computing systems in the Cognitive Engineering and Systems lab are to be used in conjunction with a Unimation/Puma 560 robotic arm located in the IE Automation lab as part of this work. Additional studies are to be conducted into the usefulness of measures of human physiological variables, such as heart rate variability, and cognitive resources, including attention, for objectively representing telepresence. Experimental observations on these measures are to be related to user performance in remotely controlling the Puma arm in simple part assembly and peg-in-hole tasks through a virtual environment simulation presenting virtual models of the robot and task objects. On the basis of these studies, a descriptive model for understanding telepresence is to be formulated along with teleoperator system configuration guidelines for telepresence.
The results of this IE research are anticipated to produce significant improvements in the design of remote robotic manipulation system interfaces being used in, for example, teleoperator applications for space and undersea exploration by encouraging in operators a sense of being at the remote site. The results are to integrated into a new IE graduate course entitled, “Human Factors in Synthetic Environments,” to provide Department students with exposure to cutting-edge research in human factors issues in teleoperations.