Expertise-based performance measures in a virtual training environment. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments

This paper introduces and validates quantitative performance measures for a rhyth-mic target-hitting task. These performance measures are derived from a detailed analysis of human performance during a month-long training experiment where par-ticipants learned to operate a 2-DOF haptic interface in a virtual environment to execute a manual control task. The motivation for the analysis presented in this paper is to determine measures of participant performance that capture the key skills of the task. This analysis of performance indicates that two quantitative mea-sures—trajectory error and input frequency—capture the key skills of the target-hitting task, as the results show a strong correlation between the performance mea-sures and the task objective of maximizing target hits. The performance trends were further explored by grouping the participants based on expertise and examin-ing trends during training in terms of these measures. In future work, these mea-sures will be used as inputs to a haptic guidance scheme that adjusts its control gains based on a real-time assessment of human performance of the task. Such guidance schemes will be incorporated into virtual training environments for hu-mans to develop manual skills for domains such as surgery, physical therapy, and sports.