Intuitive Human-Robot Interfaces Leveraging on Autonomy Features for the Control of Highly-redundant Robots

TL;DR

This paper presents intuitive human-robot interfaces that combine teleoperation, haptic feedback, and autonomous modules to enhance control of highly-redundant robots, demonstrated through various scenarios including assistive tasks.

Contribution

It introduces a novel TelePhysicalOperation interface with haptic feedback and autonomy integration, and a laser-guided interface with real-time vision tracking for flexible robot control.

Findings

User study validates the effectiveness of the haptic feedback system.

The laser interface enables precise goal indication and path following.

Autonomous behaviors improve task execution in assistive scenarios.

Abstract

[...] With the TelePhysicalOperation interface, the user can teleoperate the different capabilities of a robot (e.g., single/double arm manipulation, wheel/leg locomotion) by applying virtual forces on selected robot body parts. This approach emulates the intuitiveness of physical human-robot interaction, but at the same time it permits to teleoperate the robot from a safe distance, in a way that resembles a "Marionette" interface. The system is further enhanced with wearable haptic feedback functions to align better with the "Marionette" metaphor, and a user study has been conducted to validate its efficacy with and without the haptic channel enabled. Considering the importance of robot independence, the TelePhysicalOperation interface incorporates autonomy modules to face, for example, the teleoperation of dual-arm mobile base robots for bimanual object grasping and transportation tasks. With the laser-guided interface, the user can indicate points of interest to the robot through the utilization of a simple but effective laser emitter device. With a neural network-based vision system, the robot tracks the laser projection in real time, allowing the user to indicate not only fixed goals, like objects, but also paths to follow. With the implemented autonomous behavior, a mobile manipulator employs its locomanipulation abilities to follow the indicated goals. The behavior is modeled using Behavior Trees, exploiting their reactivity to promptly respond to changes in goal positions, and their modularity to adapt the motion planning to the task needs. The proposed laser interface has also been employed in an assistive scenario. In this case, users with upper limbs impairments can control an assistive manipulator by directing a head-worn laser emitter to the point of interests, to collaboratively address activities of everyday life. [...]