The impact of manipulator failures on remote task performance

Advanced servomanipulators are complex, multidegree-of-freedom systems. In evaluating the reliability of a servomanipulator, it is important to known how much of an impact a failure in a single degree of freedom affects task performance. This experiment examined the effects of joint failures on the performance of remote maintenance tasks with a servomanipulator. These data are valuable for control room design, telerobot modeling efforts and reliability analysis, and telerobot task analysis. However, further experimentation is required before definitive conclusions may be made. The impact of partial failures (i.e., degraded performance) on telerobot performance is a particularly important topic for reliability analysis