Identification Friend or Foe Application Demonstrating Effects of Haptics and Time Delay

As the internet and other communication channels mature, many industries are looking at these mediums to not only display information but also to perform real time tasks such as remote vehicle control, remote tuning, interactive collaborations, etc. These tasks rely heavily on visual senses and the users ability to process information in a timely manner. As networked based applications become more prevalent so too does the possibility of overloading the visual senses which could lead to reduced performance and perhaps more catastrophic outcomes. However, if the user or operator were also able to utilize the sense of touch to process information, the visual sense overload potential can be alleviated. Many tasks that are candidates for on-line deployment have, in their more conventional form, relied on the sense of touch. Take for example telesurgery. There are documented cases of telesurgical procedures whereby a surgeon has operated on a patient in a remote location via a telesurgical robot. Even though the value of telesurgical procedures is evident, one of the consequences is the loss of tactile and touch feedback – a sense a surgeon relies on heavily. One of the historical barriers to augmenting such procedures with the sense of touch is the network delay/latency and/or computational latency. It is well known that bilateral force feedback applications are very sensitive to time delays. A point and click demonstration has been developed that effectively illustrates: The increased performance when a point and click task is augmented with haptics; The effect that a time delay of as little as 50 msec has on the user’s ability to perform a point and click task with haptics; The effect that a superimposed noise has on the user’s ability to perform a point and click task with haptics and time delay; The effectiveness of a time delay compensation strategy. The demonstration is called “Identification Friend or Foe (IFF)”. The demonstration hardware consists of a computer (including a monitor) and a custom 3 DOF haptic robotic device although only 2 DOF are required for the demonstration. When the demonstration begins, the user is presented with a 2 DOF map of objects (denoted by green square boxes) randomly situated within a rectangular region of interest. For example, this may represent a snapshot of a radar screen at a given point in time. The user moves a cursor on the screen by moving the tip of the robotic device. The task at hand is to position the cursor over each green square in an effort to identify each object as either a friend or foe. When the cursor resides within the boundaries of the box for 1 second of consecutive time, the object will be identified as either a friend (denoted by a blue triangle) or a foe (denoted by a red diamond). Through the user interface, the user is able to add haptic effects and random noise to illustrate the value of haptics, the sensitivity of haptics to time delay and noise and the effectiveness of time delay compensation to provide improved performance. The graphical user interface of the IFF demonstration is illustrated in Figure 1.