Active intelligent monitoring for telerobotic tasks-tracking a handled object

Abstract

This paper proposes a concept of "active intelligent monitoring" which supports human operators in, telerobotic tasks and shows a prototype which can actively track a moving object. The concept of "intelligent monitoring" has already been reported and realized for telerobotic tasks; however, the realized system, was task-specific and passive. If the information on the remote environment is not presented to the operator appropriately during teleoperation, he/she may not be able to conduct the desired tasks. The authors believe a more flexible monitoring approach should be introduced to make telerobotic systems available in various environments where many obstacles exist and occlusion sometimes occurs. This monitoring capability will be event-driven and active so we call it "active intelligent monitoring". As a first step in constructing an active intelligent monitoring system, we implement the function of keeping a trade off between a handled and/or moving object. Hardware implementation of the constructed system and experimental results are presented in this paper.