High-Level Teleoperation System for Aerial Exploration of Indoor Environments

Abstract

Exploration of challenging indoor environments is a demanding task. While automation with aerial robots seems a promising solution, fully autonomous systems still struggle with high-level cognitive tasks and intuitive decision making. To facilitate automation, we introduce a novel teleoperation system with an aerial telerobot that is capable of handling all demanding low-level tasks. Motivated by the typical structure of indoor environments, the system creates an interactive scene topology in real-time that reduces scene details and supports affordances. Thus, difficult high-level tasks can be effectively supervised by a human operator. To elaborate on the effectiveness of our system during a real-world exploration mission, we conducted a user study. Despite being limited by real-world constraints, results indicate that our system better supports operators with indoor exploration, compared to a baseline system with traditional joystick control.

Teleoperation of industrial robot manipulators based on augmented reality

“…-This work conducts several usability tests not only for the proposed (AR) interface but also for the conventional (TP) interface. Thus, the comparison results obtained in this work are more complete and insightful than those presented in previous works [19,23,25,28,36,39],…”

“…The main reason is the benefit of tightly coupling the user input with the robot actions [39]. Thus, teleoperation has been applied to a wide variety of robots and applications, from surgical robots [31,29] or robot manipulators [16,3] to aerial robots [23,38] or underwater robots [13,43].…”

“…In [39] 18 participants were considered to test a robotic application based on AR and drones. A virtual reality application with drones is presented in [23] and 20 participants were considered to prove its performance. A robot arm application with AR is developed in [28], [36] and [19] and 34, 32 and 20 participants, respectively, were considered to test it.…”

“…Note that the mentioned works considered a similar number of participants, ranging from 16 to 34 participants and with an average value of 23.3. Therefore, twenty-three (23) participants are considered in this work for the comparison experiment. It is worth noting that, in contrast to the mentioned works, not only the proposed (AR) interface is tested in the experiment but also the conventional (TP) interface is tested.…”

Combined perception, control, and learning for teleoperation: key technologies, applications, and challenges

“…2 Iss. 2, pp [33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43]. This is an open access article published by the IET in partnership with Shenzhen University under the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)…”