Workspace Scaling in Virtual Reality based Robot Teleoperation

We explore how human-operators perform manual scaling of virtual reality (VR) scenes used to represent remote physical environments in robotic telemanipulation tasks. In our experiment, 15 human-participants were asked to use manual gesture-based navigation in a VR scene that allowed them to change the virtual-to-real scale of the virtual world and perform a simple pick-and-place task in supervised robot control mode. We have compared the virtual world scale of participants at the beginning of a 3-day experiment when they were considered to be novice teleoperators and at the end of it when they were considered to be expert teleoperators. Expert teleoperators as a group used a smaller virtual world scale that allowed them to perform the experimental task faster than novices, although this behaviour was not exhibited by every teleoperator individually. Our study also demonstrated that participants’ prior video gaming experience affects the virtual world scale as participants with video gaming experience used smaller virtual world scales and performed the experimental task faster.