Perception and Action in Simulated Telesurgery.

We studied the effect of delay on perception and action in contact with a force field that emulates elastic soft tissue with a specific rigid nonlinear boundary. Such field is similar to forces exerted on a needle during teleoperated needle insertion tasks. We found that a nonlinear boundary region causes both psychometric and motor overestimation of stiffness, and that delay causes motor but not psychometric underestimation of the stiffness of this nonlinear soft tissue. In addition we show that changing the teleoperation channel gain reduces and can even cancel the motor effect of delay.