Impact of Latency on Task Performance and User Experience in Teleoperated Object Manipulation

Abstract

Teleoperation is a promising technology in applications such as telenursing and search & rescue missions. Nevertheless, there are significant challenges when human-robot control is performed on remote sites with variable network latency. In recent years, network development has improved reliable low-latency interactions. However, since end-to-end system latency is affected by various factors, including sensing and motor actuation, in addition to network latency, we need to understand how latency affects task performance and user experience. In this paper, we study how users manipulate objects using a robotic system under various latency conditions and analysed both objective performance and subjective experiences regarding perceived delay, difficulty, agency, and embodiment. We present a teleoperation set-up consisting of a robotic arm and an anthropomorphic robotic hand that follows the operator's hand movement using real-time motion capture. 45 subjects completed two standardised manipulation tasks while receiving direct natural visual feedback. We isolated the effect of delay in the command-execution pipeline on task performance and user experience by injecting controlled latencies from 0 ms up to 200 ms to the base system latency of 220 ms. Higher latencies significantly degraded task performance and increased perceived difficulty, particularly in the fine dexterity task. We also observed that participants performed better over time, showing a clear learning effect. These results highlight the importance of minimising delays in teleoperated interactions.