During haptic communication, the central nervous system compensates distinctly for delay and noise

Abstract

Connected humans have been previously shown to exploit the exchange of haptic forces and tactile information to improve their performance in joint action tasks. As human interactions are increasingly mediated through robots and networks it is important to understand the impact that network features such as lag and noise may have on human behaviour. In this paper, we investigated the interaction with a human-like robot controller that provides similar haptic communication behaviour as human-human interaction and examined the influence and compensation mechanisms for delay and noise on haptic communication. The results of our experiments show that participants can distinguish between noise and delay, and make use of compensation mechanisms to preserve performance in both cases. However, while noise is compensated for by increasing co-contraction, delay compensation could not be explained by this strategy. Instead, computational modelling suggested that a feed-forward prediction mechanism is used to compensate for the temporal delay and yield an efficient haptic communication.