Perceiving for Acting With Teleoperated Robots: Ecological Principles to Human–Robot Interaction Design

Abstract

By primarily focusing on the perceptual information available to an organism and by adopting a functional perspective, the ecological approach to perception and action provides a unique theoretical basis for addressing the remote perception problem raised by telerobotics. After clarifying some necessary concepts of this approach, we first detail some of the major implications of an ecological perspective to robot teleoperation. Based on these, we then propose a framework for coping with the alteration of the information available to the operator. While our proposal shares much with previous works that applied ecological principles to the design of man-machine interfaces (e.g., ecological interface design), it puts a special emphasis on the control of action (instead of process) which is central to teleoperation but has been seldom addressed in the literature.