Effects of Signal Latency on Human Performance in Teleoperations

Teleoperation offers a way to harness the collaborative benefits of machine precision and efficiency combined with human flexibility and cognitive abilities. One of the main technical challenges in teleoperation is signal latency; despite the large body of literature investigating this topic, there is relatively little exploration of why signal latency impacts human performance. Those few studies on human performance in teleoperations have focused on objective measurements in short duration scenarios, often performed by newbie participants in laboratory contexts and with well-defined targets and completion goals. This is in stark contrast with the characteristics of real-world teleoperation scenarios, where highly trained operators will perform longer tasks, concurrently, in noisy environments, with combinations of performance shaping factors such as fatigue, distraction, time pressure, stress, etc. In this paper, we propose a study to evaluate the effects of signal latency on human performance in simulated scenarios that more closely mirror real-world operations.