Effectiveness of predictive display with virtual beam in force-controlled space telerobotic system

During earth-to-space teleoperation, time delay seriously reduces the operator's ability to perform given tasks. Time delay effects appear in both the visual feedback loop and the force feedback loop. Using visual feedback with time delay, the operator is forced to adopt the strategy of 'move and wait.' On the other hand it is well known that time delay in the force feedback loop causes instabilities. To overcome these problems, we propose a predictive display technique based on the concepts of optimal approach velocity and virtual beam. Experimental results show that a peg-in-hole task, which includes a contact task, is performed very effectively by our method even with long time delay. The effectiveness of our method has been verified from various viewpoints. As a result, we show that our predictive display of the end-effector for noncontact mode is helpful not only for noncontact tasks but also for contact tasks.