A Mini-Review on Mobile Manipulators with Variable Autonomy

TL;DR

This mini-review summarizes current research on mobile manipulators with variable autonomy, highlighting challenges like cognitive workload and proposing future directions such as virtual reality and large language models to enhance operation safety and efficiency.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the state of variable autonomy in mobile manipulators and suggests innovative future research directions to address existing challenges.

Findings

Identification of key challenges like cognitive workload and communication delays.

Proposal of future research avenues including whole-body autonomy and VR frameworks.

Highlighting the need for reducing operator complexity in uncertain environments.

Abstract

This paper presents a mini-review of the current state of research in mobile manipulators with variable levels of autonomy, emphasizing their associated challenges and application environments. The need for mobile manipulators in different environments is evident due to the unique challenges and risks each presents. Many systems deployed in these environments are not fully autonomous, requiring human-robot teaming to ensure safe and reliable operations under uncertainties. Through this analysis, we identify gaps and challenges in the literature on Variable Autonomy, including cognitive workload and communication delays, and propose future directions, including whole-body Variable Autonomy for mobile manipulators, virtual reality frameworks, and large language models to reduce operators' complexity and cognitive load in some challenging and uncertain scenarios.