Challenges in Collaborative HRI for Remote Robot Teams

Collaboration between human supervisors and remote teams of robots is highly challenging, particularly in high-stakes, distant, hazardous locations, such as off-shore energy platforms. In order for these teams of robots to truly be beneficial, they need to be trusted to operate autonomously, performing tasks such as inspection and emergency response, thus reducing the number of personnel placed in harm's way. As remote robots are generally trusted less than robots in close-proximity, we present a solution to instil trust in the operator through a `mediator robot' that can exhibit social skills, alongside sophisticated visualisation techniques. In this position paper, we present general challenges and then take a closer look at one challenge in particular, discussing an initial study, which investigates the relationship between the level of control the supervisor hands over to the mediator robot and how this affects their trust. We show that the supervisor is more likely to have higher trust overall if their initial experience involves handing over control of the emergency situation to the robotic assistant. We discuss this result, here, as well as other challenges and interaction techniques for human-robot collaboration.Comment: 9 pages. Peer reviewed position paper accepted in the CHI 2019 Workshop: The Challenges of Working on Social Robots that Collaborate with People (SIRCHI2019), ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May 2019, Glasgow, U

An overview of robotics and autonomous systems for harsh environments

Across a wide range of industries and applications, robotics and autonomous systems can fulfil the crucial and challenging tasks such as inspection, exploration, monitoring, drilling, sampling and mapping in areas of scientific discovery, disaster prevention, human rescue and infrastructure management, etc. However, in many situations, the associated environment is either too dangerous or inaccessible to humans. Hence, a wide range of robots have been developed and deployed to replace or aid humans in these activities. A look at these harsh environment applications of robotics demonstrate the diversity of technologies developed. This paper reviews some key application areas of robotics that involve interactions with harsh environments (such as search and rescue, space exploration, and deep-sea operations), gives an overview of the developed technologies and provides a discussion of the key trends and future directions common to many of these areas

Aerial Manipulation: A Literature Review

Aerial manipulation aims at combining the versatil- ity and the agility of some aerial platforms with the manipulation capabilities of robotic arms. This letter tries to collect the results reached by the research community so far within the field of aerial manipulation, especially from the technological and control point of view. A brief literature review of general aerial robotics and space manipulation is carried out as well

Infrastructure robotics: Research challenges and opportunities

Infrastructure robotics is about research on and development of methodologies that enable robotic systems to be used in civil infrastructure inspection, maintenance and rehabilitation. This paper briefly discusses the current research challenges and opportunities in infrastructure robotics, and presents a review of the research activities and projects in this field at the Centre for Autonomous Systems, University of Technology Sydney

Evaluation of the potential for automation and robot technology, with focus on condition monitoring on static systems for topside offshore facilities.

Master's thesis in Offshore technologyDigitalization has become one of the most important development areas across industries and work processes. We know that this also has high focus in the oil industry today. Therefore, my contribution would be to try to see where the oil and gas industry is today, the trends and what are the potential moving forward. Automation and use of robot technology has developed very rapidly the last years. Technology trends indicates large potential for automated systems in maintenance and condition monitoring. We see that this technology is implemented to a large extent in other industries. The drivers for the oil and gas industry has historically been based on improved safety. We see now a potential for both cost avoidance, reduced downtime and less impact on the environment Maintenance and inspection is a large cost for the oil industry. In addition, these processes often cause shut down of the facilities. Condition monitoring and maintenance is based on the actual status of equipment and systems. Today’s technology makes it possible. In addition, robot technology has a potential for improving safety and reduce cost and downtime by avoiding human interactions. The oil and gas industry has not been a front runner compared to other industries. The conservatism driven by safety and reliability requirements might be one reason to this. At the same time, we see a growing interest and a lot of initiatives and developments. I have chosen to study topside static systems on offshore platforms. This to be able to narrow down the study. But in general, the descriptions, analysis and discussions may also be relevant for other systems

Smart maintenance and inspection of linear assets: An Industry 4.0 approach

Linear assets have linear properties, for instance, similar underlying geometry and characteristics, over a distance. They show specific patterns of continuous inherent deteriorations and failures. Therefore, remedial inspection and maintenance actions will be similar along the length of a linear asset, but because as the asset is distributed over a large area, the execution costs are greater. Autonomous robots, for instance, unmanned aerial vehicles, pipe inspection gauges, and remotely operated vehicles, are used in different industrial settings in an ad-hoc manner for inspection and maintenance. Autonomous robots can be programmed for repetitive and specific tasks; this is useful for the inspection and maintenance of linear assets. This paper reviews the challenges of maintaining the linear assets, focusing on inspections. It also provides a conceptual framework for the use of autonomous inspection and maintenance practices for linear assets to reduce maintenance costs, human involvement, etc., whilst improving the availability of linear assets by effective use of autonomous robots and data from different sources

Asymptotically optimized multi-surface coverage path planning for loco-manipulation in inspection and monitoring

Regular inspection and monitoring of aging assets are crucial to safe operation in industrial facilities, with remote robotic monitoring being a particularly promising approach for asset inspection. However, vessels, pipework, and surfaces to be monitored can follow complex 3D surfaces, and frequently no 3D as-built models exist. In this paper, we present an end-to-end solution that uses an optimization method for coverage path planning of multiple complex surfaces for mobile robot manipulators. The system includes a two-layer hierarchical structure of optimization: mission planning and motion planning. The surface sequence is optimized with a mixed-integer linear programming formulation while motion planning solves a whole-body optimal control problem considering the robot as a floating-base system. The loco-manipulation system automatically plans a full-coverage trajectory over multiple surfaces for contact-based non-destructive monitoring after unrolling the 3D-mesh region-of-interest selected from the user interface and projects it back to the surface. Our pipeline aims at offshore asset inspection and remote monitoring in industrial applications, and is also applicable in manufacturing and maintenance where area coverage is critical. We demonstrate the generality and scalability of our solution in a variety of robotic coverage path planning applications, including for multi-surface asset inspection using a quadrupedal manipulator