User Evaluation of a Haptic-Enabled Shared-Control Approach for Robotic Telemanipulation

Abstract

Robotic telemanipulators are already widely used in nuclear decommissioning sites for handling radioactive waste. However, currently employed systems are still extremely primitive, making the handling of these materials prohibitively slow and ineffective. As the estimated cost for the decommissioning and clean-up of nuclear sites keeps rising, it is clear that one would need faster and more effective approaches. Towards this goal, in this paper we present the user evaluation of a recently proposed haptic-enabled shared-control architecture for telemanipulation. An autonomous algorithm regulates a subset of the slave manipulator degrees of freedom (DoF) in order to help the human operator in grasping an object of interest. The human operator can then steer the manipulator along the remaining null-space directions with respect to the main task by acting on a grounded haptic interface. The haptic cues provided to the operator are designed in order to inform about the feasibility of the user's commands with respect to possible constraints of the robotic system. In this paper we compared this shared-control architecture against a classical 6-DOF teleoperation approach in a real scenario by running experiments with 10 subjects. The results clearly show that the proposed shared-control approach is a viable and effective solution for improving currently-available teleoperation systems in remote telemanipulation tasks.

Haptic Shared-Control Methods for Robotic Cutting under Nonholonomic Constraints

“…In this condition, since no constraints are added to the system, τ c = 0 and τ nc = S x (τ e − Bṗ m ), where S x is a selection matrix projecting the force feedback on the non-constrained directions (the identity matrix in this case), and B ∈ R 4×4 is a damping matrix which improves the bilateral stability of the system. We chose B = diag(4 Ns/m, 4 Ns/m, 4 Ns/m, 0.05 Nms/rad) for a good trade-off between reactivity and stability (similarly to [23]).…”

A Haptic Shared-Control Architecture for Guided Multi-Target Robotic Grasping

“…The gripper is therefore constrained to move on the surface of a virtual sphere centered on the object; and the human operator can move the gripper across the surface of the sphere and toward/away from the object (i.e., changing the radius of the sphere). Although this approach proved to be quite efficient and robust [38], it has two significant limitations. First, it can only consider one object at a time: the user has to choose the object to grasp at the beginning of the task and cannot intuitively switch to another one in the scene.…”

“…The selection of these objects has followed an internal discussion with expert operators. Objects with similar cubic and parallelepipedlike shapes have been often used in telemanipulation [38], [57], [58]. A bin for dropping the grasped items is placed on the right hand side of the manipulator.…”

“…Whenever the button is pressed, the motions of the master and slave systems are decoupled (both rotations and translations). This approach allows the user to start the motion at an arbitrary position, then pause, move to a more comfortable or suitable position, and then resume control of the robot [38], [59]. Of course, clutching can be avoided by acting on the scaling of the robot motion with respect to the master interface.…”

Kinesthetic Device vs. Keyboard/Mouse: A Comparison in Home Care Telemanipulation

“…Although there has been significant progress in the field of remote telemanipulation in recent years and it is being used successfully in some areas, there is still a need for research in the field of suitable input devices (Abi-Farraj et al, 2018 ). Especially in the field of application of a telemanipulator in telecare, there are no investigations yet (Krick et al, 2019 ).…”