  Robotic teleoperation brings great potential for advances within the field of
surgery. The ability of a surgeon to reach patient remotely opens exciting
opportunities. Early experience with telerobotic surgery has been interesting,
but the clinical feasibility remains out of reach, largely due to the
deleterious effects of communication delays. Teleoperation tasks are
significantly impacted by unavoidable signal latency, which directly results in
slower operations, less precision in movements, and increased human errors.
Introducing significant changes to the surgical workflow, for example by
introducing semi-automation or self-correction, present too significant a
technological and ethical burden for commercial surgical robotic systems to
adopt. In this paper, we present three simple and intuitive motion scaling
solutions to combat teleoperated robotic systems under delay and help improve
operator accuracy. Motion scaling offers potentially improved user performance
and reduction in errors with minimal change to the underlying teleoperation
architecture. To validate the use of motion scaling as a performance enhancer
in telesurgery, we conducted a user study with 17 participants, and our results
show that the proposed solutions do indeed reduce the error rate when operating
under high delay.
