Haptic feedback during training decreases performance in telemanipulation

Abstract

Teleoperation allow us to manipulate environments that cannot be manipulated directly by a human operator, like space and deep sea, but they are also used in surgery to scale movements and filter out unwanted movements. Commercial teleoperators often lack haptic feedback to the user. Literature shows that a lack of haptic feedback can reduce fine motor control as a result of missing neuromuscular feedback, and can impair training due to a reduced capability to build accurate internal model of the slave dynamics. Current research often focusses on haptic guidance or training for applications with haptic feedback there has not been found a way to improve training for applications that lack haptic feedback. We hypothesize in this study that simulating haptic feedback during a training phase for execution without haptic feedback, is beneficial in terms of the learning process and the performance. The added haptic feedback in the early stages decreased performance at the end of the training phase and in the generalization phase. Therefore, there is no benefit of adding haptic feedback in the early stage of training when training for a task without haptic feedback