Effects of Presence on Human Performance and Workload in Simulated VR-based Telerobotics

Abstract

The Sense of Presence (SoP), which is typically described as the sensation of "being there", is an influential phenomenon that can be elicited in virtual environments. It becomes particularly important in Virtual Reality (VR)-based platforms for remote work or assistance (e.g., digital twins), whereby the quality of the interactions between the human and any virtual object determine the industrial performance and well-being of the operators. While SoP is typically assumed to have a positive impact on task performance, and also to affect mental workload, systematic investigations addressing this matter in the telerobotics field, also leveraging a mixed-method approach, are missing. We here covered these aspects by analyzing the effects of SoP on users’ performance and workload during simulated teleoperation of an industrial robotic arm in VR. Our participants guided the robot through a pick-and-place task via different control modalities and under different task loads. We operationalized the users’ performance in terms of operation times at the pick-and-place task; the explicit workload was inferred via self-report, while the implicit workload was deduced from the users’ pupil size variations. Our results demonstrate a positive effect of the SoP on task performance, suggesting higher efficiency when feeling a higher SoP. Little to no impact of the SoP on the users’ workload was observed, which however is worthy of further investigation.