Haptic Feedback Improves Human-Robot Agreement and User Satisfaction in Shared-Autonomy Teleoperation

TL;DR

This study introduces a novel haptic shared autonomy teleoperation method that enhances user agreement, satisfaction, and situational awareness by providing haptic feedback about the robot's internal state, while maintaining safety.

Contribution

The paper presents a new haptic shared autonomy paradigm that informs users about the robot's internal state through haptic feedback, improving agreement and satisfaction compared to existing methods.

Findings

Haptic shared autonomy improves task performance.

Haptic feedback increases user satisfaction.

Haptic feedback enhances situational awareness.

Abstract

Shared autonomy teleoperation can guarantee safety, but does so by reducing the human operator's control authority, which can lead to reduced levels of human-robot agreement and user satisfaction. This paper presents a novel haptic shared autonomy teleoperation paradigm that uses haptic feedback to inform the user about the inner state of a shared autonomy paradigm, while still guaranteeing safety. This differs from haptic shared control, which uses haptic feedback to inform the user's actions, but gives the human operator full control over the robot's actions. We conducted a user study in which twelve users flew a simulated UAV in a search-and-rescue task with no assistance or assistance provided by haptic shared control, shared autonomy, or haptic shared autonomy. All assistive teleoperation methods use control barrier functions to find a control command that is both safe and as close as possible to the human-generated control command. For assistive teleoperation conditions with haptic feedback, we apply a force to the user that is proportional to the difference between the human-generated control and the safe control. We find that haptic shared autonomy improves the user's task performance and satisfaction. We also find that haptic feedback in assistive teleoperation can improve the user's situational awareness. Finally, results show that adding haptic feedback to shared-autonomy teleoperation can improve human-robot agreement.