Evaluation of Immersive Teleoperation Systems using Standardized Tasks and Measurements

Despite advances regarding autonomous functionality for robots, teleoperation remains a means for performing delicate tasks in safety critical contexts like explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) and ambiguous environments. Immersive stereoscopic displays have been proposed and developed in this regard, but bring about their own specific problems, e.g., simulator sickness. This work builds upon standardized test environments to yield reproducible comparisons between different robotic platforms. The focus was placed on testing three optronic systems of differing degrees of immersion: (1) A laptop display showing multiple monoscopic camera views, (2) an off-the-shelf virtual reality headset coupled with a pantilt-based stereoscopic camera, and (3) a so-called Telepresence Unit, providing fast pan, tilt, yaw rotation, stereoscopic view, and spatial audio. Stereoscopic systems yielded significant faster task completion only for the maneuvering task. As expected, they also induced Simulator Sickness among other results. However, the amount of Simulator Sickness varied between both stereoscopic systems. Collected data suggests that a higher degree of immersion combined with careful system design can reduce the to-be-expected increase of Simulator Sickness compared to the monoscopic camera baseline while making the interface subjectively more effective for certain tasks.