Towards Supervising Remote Dexterous Robots Across Time Delay

The President s Vision for Space Exploration, laid out in 2004, relies heavily upon robotic exploration of the lunar surface in early phases of the program. Prior to the arrival of astronauts on the lunar surface, these robots will be required to be controlled across space and time, posing a considerable challenge for traditional telepresence techniques. Because time delays will be measured in seconds, not minutes as is the case for Mars Exploration, uploading the plan for a day seems excessive. An approach for controlling dexterous robots under intermediate time delay is presented, in which software running within a ground control cockpit predicts the intention of an immersed robot supervisor, then the remote robot autonomously executes the supervisor s intended tasks. Initial results are presented

Supervising Remote Humanoids Across Intermediate Time Delay

The President's Vision for Space Exploration, laid out in 2004, relies heavily upon robotic exploration of the lunar surface in early phases of the program. Prior to the arrival of astronauts on the lunar surface, these robots will be required to be controlled across space and time, posing a considerable challenge for traditional telepresence techniques. Because time delays will be measured in seconds, not minutes as is the case for Mars Exploration, uploading the plan for a day seems excessive. An approach for controlling humanoids under intermediate time delay is presented. This approach uses software running within a ground control cockpit to predict an immersed robot supervisor's motions which the remote humanoid autonomously executes. Initial results are presented

Migration from Teleoperation to Autonomy via Modular Sensor and Mobility Bricks

In this thesis, the teleoperated communications of a Remotec ANDROS robot have been reverse engineered. This research has used the information acquired through the reverse engineering process to enhance the teleoperation and add intelligence to the initially automated robot. The main contribution of this thesis is the implementation of the mobility brick paradigm, which enables autonomous operations, using the commercial teleoperated ANDROS platform. The brick paradigm is a generalized architecture for a modular approach to robotics. This architecture and the contribution of this thesis are a paradigm shift from the proprietary commercial models that exist today. The modular system of sensor bricks integrates the transformed mobility platform and defines it as a mobility brick. In the wall following application implemented in this work, the mobile robotic system acquires intelligence using the range sensor brick. This application illustrates a way to alleviate the burden on the human operator and delegate certain tasks to the robot. Wall following is one among several examples of giving a degree of autonomy to an essentially teleoperated robot through the Sensor Brick System. Indeed once the proprietary robot has been altered into a mobility brick; the possibilities for autonomy are numerous and vary with different sensor bricks. The autonomous system implemented is not a fixed-application robot but rather a non-specific autonomy capable platform. Meanwhile the native controller and the computer-interfaced teleoperation are still available when necessary. Rather than trading off by switching from teleoperation to autonomy, this system provides the flexibility to switch between the two at the operator’s command. The contributions of this thesis reside in the reverse engineering of the original robot, its upgrade to a computer-interfaced teleoperated system, the mobility brick paradigm and the addition of autonomy capabilities. The application of a robot autonomously following a wall is subsequently implemented, tested and analyzed in this work. The analysis provides the programmer with information on controlling the robot and launching the autonomous function. The results are conclusive and open up the possibilities for a variety of autonomous applications for mobility platforms using modular sensor bricks

Industrial Robotics

This book covers a wide range of topics relating to advanced industrial robotics, sensors and automation technologies. Although being highly technical and complex in nature, the papers presented in this book represent some of the latest cutting edge technologies and advancements in industrial robotics technology. This book covers topics such as networking, properties of manipulators, forward and inverse robot arm kinematics, motion path-planning, machine vision and many other practical topics too numerous to list here. The authors and editor of this book wish to inspire people, especially young ones, to get involved with robotic and mechatronic engineering technology and to develop new and exciting practical applications, perhaps using the ideas and concepts presented herein

A Survey of User Interfaces for Robot Teleoperation

Robots are used today to accomplish many tasks in society, be it in industry, at home, or as helping tools on tragic incidents. The human-robot systems currently developed span a broad variety of applications and are typically very different from one another. The interaction techniques designed for each system are also very different, although some effort has been directed in defining common properties and strategies for guiding human-robot interaction (HRI) development. This work aims to present the state-of-the-art in teleoperation interaction techniques between robots and their users. By presenting potentially useful design models and motivating discussions on topics to which the research community has been paying little attention lately, we also suggest solutions to some of the design and operational problems being faced in this area

A multi-hierarchical symbolic model of the environment for improving mobile robot operation

El trabajo desarrollado en esta tesis se centra en el estudio y aplicación de estructuras multijerárquicas, que representan el entorno de un robot móvil, con el objetivo de mejorar su capacidad de realizar tareas complejas en escenarios humanos. Un robot móvil debe poseer una representación simbólica de su entorno para poder llevar a cabo operaciones deliberativas, por ejemplo planificar tareas. Sin embargo a la hora de representar simbólicamente entornos reales, dado su complejidad, es imprescindible contar con mecanismos capaces de organizar y facilitar el acceso a la ingente cantidad de información que de ellos se deriva. Aparte del inconveniente de tratar con grandes cantidades de información, existen otros problemas subyacentes de la representación simbólica de entornos reales, los cuales aún no han sido resueltos por completo en la literatura científica. Uno de ellos consiste en el mantenimiento de la representación simbólica optimizada con respecto a las tareas que el robot debe realizar, y coherente con el entorno en el que se desenvuelve. Otro problema, relacionado con el anterior es la creación/modificación de la información simbólica a partir de información meramente sensorial (este problema es conocido como symbol-grounding). Esta tesis estudia estos problemas y aporta soluciones mediante estructuras multijerárquicas. Estas estructuras simbólicas, basadas en el concepto de abstracción, imitan la forma en la que los humanos organizamos la información espacial y permite a un robot móvil mejorar sus habilidades en entornos complejos. Las principales contribuciones de este trabajo son: - Se ha formalizado matemáticamente un modelo simbólico basado en múltiples abstracciones (multijerarquías) mediante Teoría de Categorías. Se ha desarrollado un planificador de tareas eficiente que es capaz de aprovechar la organización jerárquica del modelo simbólico del entorno. Nuestro método ha sido validado matemáticamente y se han implementado y comparado dos variantes del mismo (HPWA-1 y HPWA-2). - Una instancia particular del modelo multijerárquico ha sido estudiada e implementada para organizar información simbólica con el objetivo de mejorar simultáneamente diferentes tareas a realizar por un robot móvil. - Se ha desarrollado un procedimiento que (1) construye un modelo jerárquico del entorno de un robot, (2) lo mantiene coherente y actualizado y (3) lo optimiza con el fin de mejorar las tareas realizadas por un robot móvil. - Finalmente, se ha implementado una arquitectura robótica que engloba todas las cuestiones anteriormente citadas. Se han realizado pruebas reales con una silla de ruedas robotizada que ponen de manifiesto la utilidad del uso de estructuras multijerárquicas en robótica móvil

Evaluation of Multi-sensory Feedback in Virtual and Real Remote Environments in a USAR Robot Teleoperation Scenario

The area of Human-Robot Interaction deals with problems not only related to robots interacting with humans, but also with problems related to humans interacting and controlling robots. This dissertation focuses on the latter and evaluates multi-sensory (vision, hearing, touch, smell) feedback interfaces as a means to improve robot-operator cognition and performance. A set of four empirical studies using both simulated and real robotic systems evaluated a set of multi-sensory feedback interfaces with various levels of complexity. The task scenario for the robot in these studies involved the search for victims in a debris-filled environment after a fictitious catastrophic event (e.g., earthquake) took place. The results show that, if well-designed, multi-sensory feedback interfaces can indeed improve the robot operator data perception and performance. Improvements in operator performance were detected for navigation and search tasks despite minor increases in workload. In fact, some of the multi-sensory interfaces evaluated even led to a reduction in workload. The results also point out that redundant feedback is not always beneficial to the operator. While introducing the concept of operator omni-directional perception, that is, the operator’s capability of perceiving data or events coming from all senses and in all directions, this work explains that feedback redundancy is only beneficial when it enhances the operator omni-directional perception of data relevant to the task at hand. Last, the comprehensive methodology employed and refined over the course of the four studies is suggested as a starting point for the design of future HRI user studies. In summary, this work sheds some light on the benefits and challenges multi-sensory feedback interfaces bring, specifically on teleoperated robotics. It adds to our current understanding of these kinds of interfaces and provides a few insights to assist the continuation of research in the area