A novel teleoperation paradigm for human-robot interaction

Abstract

Internet telerobotics has emerged in recent decade with direct control and supervisory control as the main teleoperation paradigms in the field of wheeled robot navigation. It is however difficult to apply these paradigms in the unknown and dynamic real-world applications, while they do not provide adequate feeling of interaction or a human-friendly control interface to the human operator. This paper proposes a novel interactive control (active supervisory control) telecommanding, which is used for Internet-based mobile robot teleoperation. Telecommanding involves two parts: basic telecommanding, using joystick commands, and advanced telecommanding, using linguistic commands. Assisted by up-to-date data visualization and media streaming technologies, telecommanding can help a novice operator to simply, easily, and remotely control a robot through the Internet navigating in an unknown and dynamic real world. Telecommanding enables the robot to autonomously handle real-world uncertainty, improves the interactivity of humans and robot, and solve the problems of arbitrary network delays and restricted bandwidth. The experiments, including an Internet-based teleoperation test over 1500 kilometers from Beijing to Hong Kong, have demonstrated the promising performance and the advantages of this paradigm over direct control and passive supervisory control.