Quantitative Physical Ergonomics Assessment of Teleoperation Interfaces

TL;DR

This paper introduces a quantitative framework for evaluating human factors and ergonomics in teleoperation interfaces, combining online body configuration measurements with traditional usability assessments to improve interface selection.

Contribution

It presents a novel framework that integrates objective ergonomic metrics with subjective usability analysis for teleoperation interfaces.

Findings

Quantitative metrics like joint usage and posture comfort are effective.

The framework correlates well with subjective usability assessments.

Demonstrated on two teleoperation interfaces with real-world experiments.

Abstract

Human factors and ergonomics are the essential constituents of teleoperation interfaces, which can significantly affect the human operator's performance. Thus, a quantitative evaluation of these elements and the ability to establish reliable comparison bases for different teleoperation interfaces are the keys to select the most suitable one for a particular application. However, most of the works on teleoperation have so far focused on the stability analysis and the transparency improvement of these systems, and do not cover the important usability aspects. In this work, we propose a foundation to build a general framework for the analysis of human factors and ergonomics in employing diverse teleoperation interfaces. The proposed framework will go beyond the traditional subjective analyses of usability by complementing it with online measurements of the human body configurations. As a result, multiple quantitative metrics such as joints' usage, range of motion comfort, center of mass divergence, and posture comfort are introduced. To demonstrate the potential of the proposed framework, two different teleoperation interfaces are considered, and real-world experiments with eleven participants performing a simulated industrial remote pick-and-place task are conducted. The quantitative results of this analysis are provided, and compared with subjective questionnaires, illustrating the effectiveness of the proposed framework.