Comparison Between Position and Rate Control Using a Foot Interface

There has been a recent increase in research related to supernumerary robotic arms. A challenge with supernumerary robotic arms is how to operate them effectively. One solution is to use the foot to teleoperate the arm. That frees the person to use their arms for other tasks. However, unlike hand interfaces, it is not known how to create effective foot control for robotic teleoperation. This paper presents an experiment to compare position and rate control methods for foot interfaces. A foot interface is presented that can be used for both position and rate control. A human subject experiment uses 2D positioning tasks to evaluate the effectiveness of each control method. These same tasks are tested with a hand interface to provide a baseline for comparison. Results show that, similar to the hand, position control performs faster than rate control when using the foot.