<title>Human factors in telemanipulation: perspectives from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory experience</title>

Abstract

Personnel at the Robotics and Process Systems Division (RPSD) of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory have extensive experience designing, building, and operating teleoperators for a variety of settings, including space, battlefields, nuclear fuel reprocessing plants, and hazardous waste retrieval. In the course of the last decade and a half, the RPSD designed, built, and operated 4 telemanipulators (M-2, ASM, LTM, CESAR arm) and operated another half dozen (M-8, Model 50, TOS SM-229, RM-10, PaR 5000, BilArm 83A). During this period, human factors professionals have been closely integrated with RPSD design teams, investigating telemanipulator feedback and feed forward, designing cockpits and control rooms, training users and designers, and helping to develop performance specifications for telemanipulators. This paper presents a brief review of this and other work, with an aim towards providing perspectives on some of the human factors aspects of telemanipulation.