Human Perceived Transparency with Time Delay

Transparency – in the sense that the technical systems and communication network should not be felt by the human – is one of the key issues in telerobotics control design. The communication characteristics is one of the crucial factors for the achievable transparency level in bilateral telerobotic control architectures. Especially time delay – resulting from the communication network between the operator site and the tele-robot – deteriorates the realistic (transparent) perception of the remote environment. The quantitative analysis of the time delay influences on transparency is the major goal of this chapter. Technical measures along with human haptic perception characteristics play a key role when evaluating transparency. The guiding questions for this chapter are: how does constant time delay modify the mechanical properties displayed to the human, and can the human perceive this distortion or not. The mass, spring, and damper characteristics as displayed to the human are derived as function of the time delay and the environment parameters. Known psychophysical facts are applied to analyze and interpret the results from a human perception point of view. The results are validated in simulations, experiments, and human user studies.