  Teleoperation has emerged as an alternative solution to fully-autonomous
systems for achieving human-level capabilities on humanoids. Specifically,
teleoperation with whole-body control is a promising hands-free strategy to
command humanoids but demands more physical and mental effort. To mitigate this
limitation, researchers have proposed shared-control methods incorporating
robot decision-making to aid humans on low-level tasks, further reducing
operation effort. However, shared-control methods for wheeled humanoid
telelocomotion on a whole-body level has yet to be explored. In this work, we
study how whole-body feedback affects the performance of different
shared-control methods for obstacle avoidance in diverse environments. A
Time-Derivative Sigmoid Function (TDSF) is proposed to generate more intuitive
force feedback from obstacles. Comprehensive human experiments were conducted,
and the results concluded that force feedback enhances the whole-body
telelocomotion performance in unfamiliar environments but could reduce
performance in familiar environments. Conveying the robot's intention through
haptics showed further improvements since the operator can utilize the force
feedback for short-distance planning and visual feedback for long-distance
planning.
