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Experimental Comparison of Direct and Indirect Haptic Aids in Support of Obstacle Avoidance for Remotely Piloted Vehicles

The sense of telepresence is known to be essential in teleoperation environments, where the operator is physically separated from the vehicle. Usually only a visual feedback is provided, but it has been shown that by extending the visual interface with haptic feedback, that is complementing the visual information through the sense of touch, the teleoperator has a better perception of information from the remote environment and its constraints. This paper focuses on a novel concept of haptic cueing for an airborne obstacle avoidance task; the novel cueing algorithm was designed to appear "natural" to the operator, and to improve the human-machine interface without directly acting on the actual aircraft commands. Two different haptic aiding concepts for obstacle avoidance support are presented: an existing and widely used system, belonging to what we called the Direct Haptic Aid (DHA) approach class, and a novel one based on the Indirect Haptic Aid (IHA) approach class. Tests with human operators show that a net improvement in terms of performance (i.e., the number of collisions) is provided by employing the IHA haptic cue as compared to both the DHA haptic cue and/or the visual cues only. The results clearly show that the IHA philosophy is a valid alternative to the other commonly used approaches, which fall in the DHA category.