Communication Modalities for Supervised Teleoperation in Highly Dexterous Tasks - Does one size fit all?

TL;DR

This paper investigates how different communication modalities affect supervised teleoperation performance in complex dexterous tasks like surgery, finding that more expressive modalities improve efficiency as task complexity increases.

Contribution

It introduces an analysis of communication modalities in teleoperation, demonstrating that expressive modalities combined with higher supervision levels enhance performance in complex tasks.

Findings

Speech modality with action supervision reduces task time in peg transfer

More expressive modalities outperform less expressive ones in complex tasks

Performance improves with increased modality expressiveness as task complexity rises

Abstract

This study tries to explain the connection between communication modalities and levels of supervision in teleoperation during a dexterous task, like surgery. This concept is applied to two surgical related tasks: incision and peg transfer. It was found that as the complexity of the task escalates, the combination linking human supervision with a more expressive modality shows better performance than other combinations of modalities and control. More specifically, in the peg transfer task, the combination of speech modality and action level supervision achieves shorter task completion time (77.1 +- 3.4 s) with fewer mistakes (0.20 +- 0.17 pegs dropped).