Teleautonomous systems: projecting and coordinating intelligent action at a distance

Abstract

There is a growing need for humans to perform complex remote operations and to extend the intelligence and experience of experts to distant applications. A blending of human intelligence, modern information technology, remote control, and intelligent autonomous systems is required, and the authors have coined the term teleautonomous technology, or teleautomation, for methods for producing intelligent action at a distance. Teleautomation goes beyond autonomous control in that it blends in human intelligenge and action as appropriate. I t goes beyond teleoperation in that it incorporates as much autonomy as i s possible or reasonable. A new approach for solving one of the fundamental problems facing teleautonomous systems is discussed in detail: the need to overcome time delays due to telemetry and signal propagation. New concepts, called time and position clutches, are introduced; these allow the time and position frames, respectively, between the local user control and the remote device being controlled to be desynchronized. The design and implementation of these mechanisms are described in detail. I t is demonstrated that these mechanisms lead to substantial telemanipulation performance improvements, including the novel result of improvements even in the absence of time delays. The novel controls also yield a simple protocol for handoffs of the control of manipulation tasks between local operators and remote systems.

Retardo en la transmisión de información en la red Internet

“…Existen varios métodos para realizar el Tele-control de los robots móviles a través de la red Internet [1], uno de estos métodos es el denominado control directo y continuo [2] y consiste en que el robot sigue las órdenes enviadas por el operador, figura 1. …”

A survey of telerobotic surface finishing

“…Telerobotics deals with teleoperated robots. Conway et al [6] categorize methods of teleoperation (teleautonomous control) into the following, going from direct to more automatic methods: direct continuous control, shared continuous control, discrete command control, supervisory control, learning control and guidance of remote nonexpert humans by local experts. All these schemes, except the last one, are feasible for telerobotic surface nishing.…”

“…Figure 1 presents an example of the components a telerobotic surface nishing system could consist of. Traditionally, telerobotics has been mostly applied to dangerous environments and critical tasks, such as space robotics, subsea robotics, and telesurgery [8], but also to tasks that require human skill and supervision [6], such as operating forestry cranes. If a telerobotic system is used instead of a manual tool, the process can be made semiautomatic to relieve the operator of mundane and repetitive tasks and to increase precision or speed when necessary.…”

Supervisory control of multiple social robots for navigation

“…Supervisory control [10] is an effective way of ensuring robot safety and compensating for technology limitations, wherein a human operator controls the robots when there are potential dangers or failures of autonomy during navigation. Because large proportion of tasks can be conducted autonomously, it is possible to enable a single operator to supervise multiple robots by only controlling the robots when necessary, which can extend human capabilities and improve system efficiency [11].…”