Intuitive Robot Teleoperation Based on Haptic Feedback and 3D Visualization

Robots are required in many jobs. The jobs related to tele-operation may be very challenging and often require reaching a destination quickly and with minimum collisions. In order to succeed in these jobs, human operators are asked to tele-operate a robot manually through a user interface. The design of a user interface and of the information provided in it, become therefore critical elements for the successful completion of robot tele-operation tasks. Effective and timely robot tele-navigation mainly relies on the intuitiveness provided by the interface and on the richness and presentation of the feedback given. This project investigated the use of both haptic and visual feedbacks in a user interface for robot tele-navigation. The aim was to overcome some of the limitations observed in a state of the art works, turning what is sometimes described as contrasting into an added value to improve tele-navigation performance. The key issue is to combine different human sensory modalities in a coherent way and to benefit from 3-D vision too. The proposed new approach was inspired by how visually impaired people use walking sticks to navigate. Haptic feedback may provide helpful input to a user to comprehend distances to surrounding obstacles and information about the obstacle distribution. This was proposed to be achieved entirely relying on on-board range sensors, and by processing this input through a simple scheme that regulates magnitude and direction of the environmental force-feedback provided to the haptic device. A specific algorithm was also used to render the distribution of very close objects to provide appropriate touch sensations. Scene visualization was provided by the system and it was shown to a user coherently to haptic sensation. Different visualization configurations, from multi-viewpoint observation to 3-D visualization, were proposed and rigorously assessed through experimentations, to understand the advantages of the proposed approach and performance variations among different 3-D display technologies. Over twenty users were invited to participate in a usability study composed by two major experiments. The first experiment focused on a comparison between the proposed haptic-feedback strategy and a typical state of the art approach. It included testing with a multi-viewpoint visual observation. The second experiment investigated the performance of the proposed haptic-feedback strategy when combined with three different stereoscopic-3D visualization technologies. The results from the experiments were encouraging and showed good performance with the proposed approach and an improvement over literature approaches to haptic feedback in robot tele-operation. It was also demonstrated that 3-D visualization can be beneficial for robot tele-navigation and it will not contrast with haptic feedback if it is properly aligned to it. Performance may vary with different 3-D visualization technologies, which is also discussed in the presented work

Intuitive Robot Teleoperation through Multi-Sensor Informed Mixed Reality Visual Aids

© 2021 The Author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.Mobile robotic systems have evolved to include sensors capable of truthfully describing robot status and operating environment as accurately and reliably as never before. This possibility is challenged by effective sensor data exploitation, because of the cognitive load an operator is exposed to, due to the large amount of data and time-dependency constraints. This paper addresses this challenge in remote-vehicle teleoperation by proposing an intuitive way to present sensor data to users by means of using mixed reality and visual aids within the user interface. We propose a method for organizing information presentation and a set of visual aids to facilitate visual communication of data in teleoperation control panels. The resulting sensor-information presentation appears coherent and intuitive, making it easier for an operator to catch and comprehend information meaning. This increases situational awareness and speeds up decision-making. Our method is implemented on a real mobile robotic system operating outdoor equipped with on-board internal and external sensors, GPS, and a reconstructed 3D graphical model provided by an assistant drone. Experimentation verified feasibility while intuitive and comprehensive visual communication was confirmed through a qualitative assessment, which encourages further developments.Peer reviewe

Development and evaluation of mixed reality-enhanced robotic systems for intuitive tele-manipulation and telemanufacturing tasks in hazardous conditions

In recent years, with the rapid development of space exploration, deep-sea discovery, nuclear rehabilitation and management, and robotic-assisted medical devices, there is an urgent need for humans to interactively control robotic systems to perform increasingly precise remote operations. The value of medical telerobotic applications during the recent coronavirus pandemic has also been demonstrated and will grow in the future. This thesis investigates novel approaches to the development and evaluation of a mixed reality-enhanced telerobotic platform for intuitive remote teleoperation applications in dangerous and difficult working conditions, such as contaminated sites and undersea or extreme welding scenarios. This research aims to remove human workers from the harmful working environments by equipping complex robotic systems with human intelligence and command/control via intuitive and natural human-robot- interaction, including the implementation of MR techniques to improve the user's situational awareness, depth perception, and spatial cognition, which are fundamental to effective and efficient teleoperation. The proposed robotic mobile manipulation platform consists of a UR5 industrial manipulator, 3D-printed parallel gripper, and customized mobile base, which is envisaged to be controlled by non-skilled operators who are physically separated from the robot working space through an MR-based vision/motion mapping approach. The platform development process involved CAD/CAE/CAM and rapid prototyping techniques, such as 3D printing and laser cutting. Robot Operating System (ROS) and Unity 3D are employed in the developing process to enable the embedded system to intuitively control the robotic system and ensure the implementation of immersive and natural human-robot interactive teleoperation. This research presents an integrated motion/vision retargeting scheme based on a mixed reality subspace approach for intuitive and immersive telemanipulation. An imitation-based velocity- centric motion mapping is implemented via the MR subspace to accurately track operator hand movements for robot motion control, and enables spatial velocity-based control of the robot tool center point (TCP). The proposed system allows precise manipulation of end-effector position and orientation to readily adjust the corresponding velocity of maneuvering. A mixed reality-based multi-view merging framework for immersive and intuitive telemanipulation of a complex mobile manipulator with integrated 3D/2D vision is presented. The proposed 3D immersive telerobotic schemes provide the users with depth perception through the merging of multiple 3D/2D views of the remote environment via MR subspace. The mobile manipulator platform can be effectively controlled by non-skilled operators who are physically separated from the robot working space through a velocity-based imitative motion mapping approach. Finally, this thesis presents an integrated mixed reality and haptic feedback scheme for intuitive and immersive teleoperation of robotic welding systems. By incorporating MR technology, the user is fully immersed in a virtual operating space augmented by real-time visual feedback from the robot working space. The proposed mixed reality virtual fixture integration approach implements hybrid haptic constraints to guide the operator’s hand movements following the conical guidance to effectively align the welding torch for welding and constrain the welding operation within a collision-free area. Overall, this thesis presents a complete tele-robotic application space technology using mixed reality and immersive elements to effectively translate the operator into the robot’s space in an intuitive and natural manner. The results are thus a step forward in cost-effective and computationally effective human-robot interaction research and technologies. The system presented is readily extensible to a range of potential applications beyond the robotic tele- welding and tele-manipulation tasks used to demonstrate, optimise, and prove the concepts

Sensor Augmented Virtual Reality Based Teleoperation Using Mixed Autonomy

A multimodal teleoperation interface is introduced, featuring an integrated virtual reality (VR) based simulation augmented by sensors and image processing capabilities onboard the remotely operated vehicle. The proposed virtual reality interface fuses an existing VR model with live video feed and prediction states, thereby creating a multimodal control interface. VR addresses the typical limitations of video based teleoperation caused by signal lag and limited field of view, allowing the operator to navigate in a continuous fashion. The vehicle incorporates an onboard computer and a stereo vision system to facilitate obstacle detection. A vehicle adaptation system with a priori risk maps and a real-state tracking system enable temporary autonomous operation of the vehicle for local navigation around obstacles and automatic re-establishment of the vehicle’s teleoperated state. The system provides real time update of the virtual environment based on anomalies encountered by the vehicle. The VR based multimodal teleoperation interface is expected to be more adaptable and intuitive when compared with other interfaces

Dynamic virtual reality user interface for teleoperation of heterogeneous robot teams

This research investigates the possibility to improve current teleoperation control for heterogeneous robot teams using modern Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) techniques such as Virtual Reality. It proposes a dynamic teleoperation Virtual Reality User Interface (VRUI) framework to improve the current approach to teleoperating heterogeneous robot teams

Perception-driven approaches to real-time remote immersive visualization

In remote immersive visualization systems, real-time 3D perception through RGB-D cameras, combined with modern Virtual Reality (VR) interfaces, enhances the user’s sense of presence in a remote scene through 3D reconstruction rendered in a remote immersive visualization system. Particularly, in situations when there is a need to visualize, explore and perform tasks in inaccessible environments, too hazardous or distant. However, a remote visualization system requires the entire pipeline from 3D data acquisition to VR rendering satisfies the speed, throughput, and high visual realism. Mainly when using point-cloud, there is a fundamental quality difference between the acquired data of the physical world and the displayed data because of network latency and throughput limitations that negatively impact the sense of presence and provoke cybersickness. This thesis presents state-of-the-art research to address these problems by taking the human visual system as inspiration, from sensor data acquisition to VR rendering. The human visual system does not have a uniform vision across the field of view; It has the sharpest visual acuity at the center of the field of view. The acuity falls off towards the periphery. The peripheral vision provides lower resolution to guide the eye movements so that the central vision visits all the interesting crucial parts. As a first contribution, the thesis developed remote visualization strategies that utilize the acuity fall-off to facilitate the processing, transmission, buffering, and rendering in VR of 3D reconstructed scenes while simultaneously reducing throughput requirements and latency. As a second contribution, the thesis looked into attentional mechanisms to select and draw user engagement to specific information from the dynamic spatio-temporal environment. It proposed a strategy to analyze the remote scene concerning the 3D structure of the scene, its layout, and the spatial, functional, and semantic relationships between objects in the scene. The strategy primarily focuses on analyzing the scene with models the human visual perception uses. It sets a more significant proportion of computational resources on objects of interest and creates a more realistic visualization. As a supplementary contribution, A new volumetric point-cloud density-based Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) metric is proposed to evaluate the introduced techniques. An in-depth evaluation of the presented systems, comparative examination of the proposed point cloud metric, user studies, and experiments demonstrated that the methods introduced in this thesis are visually superior while significantly reducing latency and throughput

Anthropomorphic Robot Design and User Interaction Associated with Motion

Though in its original concept a robot was conceived to have some human-like shape, most robots now in use have specific industrial purposes and do not closely resemble humans. Nevertheless, robots that resemble human form in some way have continued to be introduced. They are called anthropomorphic robots. The fact that the user interface to all robots is now highly mediated means that the form of the user interface is not necessarily connected to the robots form, human or otherwise. Consequently, the unique way the design of anthropomorphic robots affects their user interaction is through their general appearance and the way they move. These robots human-like appearance acts as a kind of generalized predictor that gives its operators, and those with whom they may directly work, the expectation that they will behave to some extent like a human. This expectation is especially prominent for interactions with social robots, which are built to enhance it. Often interaction with them may be mainly cognitive because they are not necessarily kinematically intricate enough for complex physical interaction. Their body movement, for example, may be limited to simple wheeled locomotion. An anthropomorphic robot with human form, however, can be kinematically complex and designed, for example, to reproduce the details of human limb, torso, and head movement. Because of the mediated nature of robot control, there remains in general no necessary connection between the specific form of user interface and the anthropomorphic form of the robot. But their anthropomorphic kinematics and dynamics imply that the impact of their design shows up in the way the robot moves. The central finding of this report is that the control of this motion is a basic design element through which the anthropomorphic form can affect user interaction. In particular, designers of anthropomorphic robots can take advantage of the inherent human-like movement to 1) improve the users direct manual control over robot limbs and body positions, 2) improve users ability to detect anomalous robot behavior which could signal malfunction, and 3) enable users to be better able to infer the intent of robot movement. These three benefits of anthropomorphic design are inherent implications of the anthropomorphic form but they need to be recognized by designers as part of anthropomorphic design and explicitly enhanced to maximize their beneficial impact. Examples of such enhancements are provided in this report. If implemented, these benefits of anthropomorphic design can help reduce the risk of Inadequate Design of Human and Automation Robotic Integration (HARI) associated with the HARI-01 gap by providing efficient and dexterous operator control over robots and by improving operator ability to detect malfunctions and understand the intention of robot movement