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Fluid 6DOF teleoperation of robot manipulators enables telemanipulation where autonomy is not possible, facilitates the collection of demonstration data, and aids routine robotics development. Amongst 6DOF input devices, 3D mice stand apart for their ergonomic design and low cost, but their sensitivity and users' relative inexperience with them require special design considerations. We contribute a web software package that makes integrating 3D mice in robot manipulation interfaces easy. The package consists of configurable input signal processing schemes that can make the device more forgiving by, for instance, rejecting small inputs or emphasizing a dominant axis, and an interactive visual representation of the device's 6DOF twist input, which helps with operator familiarization and provides a visual aide during teleoperation. We provide a demonstration interface illustrating a typical integration with a ROS/ROS2 robot system and give usage advice based on our research experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teleoperation of mobile manipulators within a home environment can significantly enhance the independence of individuals with severe motor impairments, allowing them to regain the ability to perform self-care and household tasks. There is a critical need for novel teleoperation interfaces to offer effective alternatives for individuals with impairments who may encounter challenges in using existing interfaces due to physical limitations. In this work, we iterate on one such interface, HAT (Head-Worn Assistive Teleoperation), an inertial-based wearable integrated into any head-worn garment. We evaluate HAT through a 7-day in-home study with Henry Evans, a non-speaking individual with quadriplegia who has participated extensively in assistive robotics studies. We additionally evaluate HAT with a proposed shared control method for mobile manipulators termed Driver Assistance and demonstrate how the interface generalizes to other physical devices and contexts. Our results show that HAT is a strong teleoperation interface across key metrics including efficiency, errors, learning curve, and workload. Code and videos are located on our project website. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shared control approaches to robot assistance, which predict a user's goal based on their control input and provide autonomous assistance towards the predicted goal, typically assume that user behavior remains the same despite the presence of the assistance and rely on this assumption to infer user goals. However, people operating assisted systems continuously observe the robot behaving differently from their expectations, which may lead them to adapt their control behavior to better achieve their desired outcomes. In this paper, we show that users both change their control behavior when assistance is added and describe these changes as responses to the new system dynamics. In a computer-based bubble popping study, participants report changing their strategies with different levels of assistance, and analysis of their actual control input validates this change. In an in-the-wild robot study, participants teleoperated a robot to pick up a cup despite the presence of "assistance'' that drives the system away from the true goals of the task. Participants can overcome the "assistance" and reach the goal, which requires them to correct for the novel system dynamics. These results motivate further research in user-centered design and evaluation of assistive systems that treat the user as intentional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emergency department (ED) healthcare workers (HCWs) are interrupted as often as once every six minutes, increasing the risk of errors and preventable patient harm. As more robots enter hospitals, and the ED, they must support HCWs in managing interruptions, and ideally mitigate their harmful effects, without disrupting ED communication. However, interruption-mitigation strategies, particularly for mobile telemanipulator robots (MTRs), are not well understood. In this work, we explore interruption-mitigation and reorientation methods for MTRs in the ED. We conducted a study where ED HCWs teleoperated an MTR in a realistic hospital simulation environment. Our findings revealed insights on how MTRs might support multitasking in environments with frequent task switching, and the place of autonomy in safety-critical spaces. Conflicting opinions about the appropriateness of different MTR behaviors highlighted challenges and ethical dilemmas that influence the integration of MTRs in the ED. This work will support the implementation of interruption-mitigation strategies on MTRs, enabling them to better support people in fast-paced, interruption-driven environments thus reducing the risk of errors in these situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Socially Assistive Robots are effective at supporting autistic children in a variety of different therapies. Therapists can control the robots' motions and verbalizations to engage children and deliver therapeutic interventions based on their needs. We present teleoperation capabilities to support therapists in customizing therapy to their clients' needs. Specifically, we introduce a documentation sidebar that aims to prime therapists using their clients' documented needs, and a session summary report that helps therapists reflect on the session with the child. We present preliminary designs for these capabilities and describe future work to build upon them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robots are increasingly present in ethically fraught childhood spaces. In such contexts, HRI researchers should leverage mixed-methods approaches. This is especially true in domains where robots are teleoperated by adult experts-such as therapy. A mixed-methods approach can help researchers build a thorough qualitative understanding of adult experts' needs, incorporate stakeholder perspectives through participatory design, and motivate experimental evaluations with this insight. Through such a user-centered, mixed-methods approach, robotics researchers can ultimately improve the experience of both adults and children in these spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the effects of delays in a mimicry-control robot teleoperation interface which involves a user moving their arms to directly show the robot how to move and the robot follows in real time. Unlike prior work considering delays in other teleoperation systems, we consider delays due to robot slowness in addition to latency in the onset of movement commands. We present a human-subjects study that shows how different amounts and types of delays have different effects on task performance. We compare the movements under different delays to reveal the strategies that operators use to adapt to delay conditions and to explain performance differences. Our results show that users can quickly develop strategies to adapt to slowness delays but not onset latency delays. We discuss the implications of our results for the future development of methods designed to mitigate the effects of delays. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teleoperation remains a dominant control paradigm for human interaction with robotic systems. However, teleoperation can be quite challenging, especially for novice users. Even experienced users may face difficulties or inefficiencies when operating a robot with unfamiliar and/or complex dynamics, such as industrial manipulators or aerial robots, as teleoperation forces users to focus on low-level aspects of robot control, rather than higher level goals regarding task completion, data analysis, and problem solving. We explore how advances in augmented reality (AR) may enable the design of novel teleoperation interfaces that increase operation effectiveness, support the user in conducting concurrent work, and decrease stress. Our key insight is that AR may be used in conjunction with prior work on predictive graphical interfaces such that a teleoperator controls a virtual robot surrogate, rather than directly operating the robot itself, providing the user with foresight regarding where the physical robot will end up and how it will get there. We present the design of two AR interfaces using such a surrogate: one focused on real-time control and one inspired by waypoint delegation. We compare these designs against a baseline teleoperation system in a laboratory experiment in which novice and expert users piloted an aerial robot to inspect an environment and analyze data. Our results revealed that the augmented reality prototypes provided several objective and subjective improvements, demonstrating the promise of leveraging AR to improve human-robot interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate if an on-screen agent that reacts to a teleoperator's driving performance (e.g., by showing fear during poor driving) can influence teleoperation. Serving as a kind of virtual passenger, we explore if and how this agent's reactions may impact teleoperation. Our design concept is to create an emotional response in the operator (e.g., to feel bad for the agent), with the ultimate goal of shaping driving behavior (e.g., to slow down to calm the agent). We designed and implemented two proof-of-concept agent personas that react differently to operator driving. By conducting an initial proof-of-concept study comparing our agents to a base case, we were able to observe the impact of our agent personas on operator experience, perception of the robot, and driving behavior. While our results failed to find compelling evidence of changed teleoperator behavior, we did demonstrate that emotional on-screen agents can alter teleoperator emotion. Our initial results support the plausibility of passenger agents for impacting teleoperation, and highlight potential for more targeted, ongoing work in applying social techniques to teleoperation interfaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ergonomics and human comfort are essential concerns in physical human-robot interaction (p-HRI) applications such as teleoperation. We introduce a novel framework for posture estimation and optimization for ergonomically intelligent teleoperation systems that estimates the human operator's posture solely from the leader robot's trajectory and provides online postural correction and offline initial posture correction according to the type of teleoperation task. Although our framework is in teleoperation, it can be extended to other p-HRI applications with minimal modifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robot teleoperation can be a challenging task, often requiring a great deal of user training and expertise, especially for platforms with high degrees-of-freedom (e.g., industrial manipulators and aerial robots). Users often struggle to synthesize information robots collect (e.g., a camera stream) with contextual knowledge of how the robot is moving in the environment. We explore how advances in augmented reality (AR) technologies are creating a new design space for mediating robot teleoperation by enabling novel forms of intuitive, visual feedback. We prototype several aerial robot teleoperation interfaces using AR, which we evaluate in a 48-participant user study where participants completed an environmental inspection task. Our new interface designs provided several objective and subjective performance benefits over existing systems, which often force users into an undesirable paradigm that divides user attention between monitoring the robot and monitoring the robot's camera feed(s). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perceptions of a technology can shape the way the technology is used and adopted. Thus, in teleoperation, it is important to understand how a teleoperator's perceptions of a robot can be shaped, and whether those perceptions can impact how people drive robots. Priming, evoking activity in a person by exposing them to learned stimuli, is one way of shaping someone's perception. We investigate priming an operator's impression of a robot's physical capabilities in order to impact their perception of the robot and teleoperation behavior; that is, we examine if we can change operator driving behavior simply by making them believe that a robot is dangerous or safe, fast or slow, etc., without actually changing robot capability. Our results show that priming (with no change to robot behavior or capability) can impact operator perception of the robot, their teleoperation experience, and in some cases may impact teleoperation performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Priming is the influence of external stimuli on a person's behavior and thoughts, where the effect is related to some quality of that stimuli. In this work, we explore three methods of priming teleoperator's expectations about robot capability and investigate how this may impact driving behavior and perceptions of the robot. We tested priming impressions of robot ability by the stiffness of the robot controller, additionally describing the changes in stiffness verbally to operators and simply describing the robots' abilities on paper and verbally. Our results found that all priming methods affected the perception of the robot including its speed, weight, or overall safety. Further, we confirmed that some priming methods lowered operator collisions by over 40%. Thus, interface and product designers should consider priming as a tool to leverage to improve operator performance and perception of the robot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We live in an aging society; social-physical humanrobot interaction has the potential to keep our older adults healthy by motivating them to exercise. After summarizing prior work, this paper proposes a tool that can be used to design exercise and therapy interactions to be performed by an upperbody humanoid robot. The interaction design tool comprises a teleoperation system that transmits the operator's arm motions, head motions and facial expression along with an interface to monitor and assess the motion of the user interacting with the robot. We plan to use this platform to create dynamic and intuitive exercise interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper two scheme blocks have been conceived for each main Internet teleoperation paradigms: direct control and supervisory control and also for the second paradigm - an application related to web - based laboratory architecture is presented, which can be used in educational laboratories and can be easily extend for educational e-laboratories, too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Programming by Demonstration (PbD) is an efficient way for non-experts to teach new skills to a robot. PbD can be carried out in different ways, for instance, by kinesthetic guidance, teleoperation or by using external controls. In this paper, we compare these three ways of controlling a robot in terms of efficiency, effectiveness (success and error rate) and usability. In an industrial assembly scenario, 51 participants carried out pegin- hole tasks using one of the three control modalities. The results show that kinesthetic guidance produces the best results. In order to test whether the problems during teleoperation are due to the fact that users cannot, like in kinesthetic guidance, switch between control points using traditional teleoperation devices, we designed a new device that allows users to switch between controls for large and small movements. A user study with 15 participants shows that the novel teleoperation device yields almost as good results as kinesthetic guidance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even as autonomous capabilities improve, many robot manipulation tasks require human(s)-in-the-loop to resolve high-level problems in uncertain environments or ambiguous situations. Prior work in highly autonomous applications tends to use interfaces with few human interface modalities, potentially missing out on the benefits that multimodal interfaces have demonstrated in lower-level operation. In this work, we demonstrate a system with a multimodal interface for a controlling a robot at a high level of autonomy. This example highlights how multiple modalities could enable redundant and robust interactions, increased situational awareness, and compact representations of complex commands, such as how to grasp an object. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of CISTI (Iberian Conference on Information Systems & Technologies / Conferência Ibérica de Sistemas e Tecnologias de Informação) Proceedings is the property of Conferencia Iberica de Sistemas Tecnologia de Informacao and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of CISTI (Iberian Conference on Information Systems & Technologies / Conferência Ibérica de Sistemas e Tecnologias de Informação) Proceedings is the property of Conferencia Iberica de Sistemas Tecnologia de Informacao and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In telerobotic systems the goal is to project human abilities from master side to the environment. One of the most important human skills is the capability of acting with different impedances at various situations proportional to the task. In this paper we focused on problems of variable environment or operator's hand impedances that persuaded us to utilize time domain stability analysis, and it could cause unbounded environment force and then, instability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Teleoperation is a mechanism that makes it possible to accomplish a task in an environment where the presence of the master at the slave site is either undesirable or hardly possible The communication delay is a challenge with undesirable effects, jeopardizing the teleoperated systems the most. When the salve agent is performing in a dynamically changing environment, communication delay can be very harmful since the environment is changing continuously even though the agent has stopped operating because of the delay. Many studies have been conducted to overcome time delay effects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, several kinds of virtual guides have been developed which aims at mitigating trajectory errors between real mobile manipulator and its virtual model, hence improving both the accuracy and the safety of teleoperation. By utilizing proposed virtual guide sphere, corresponding virtual guides have been constructed. Then geometric analysis is conducted since the position relation of manipulator and virtual guide determines their particular interactive states. The experiment is based on human-machine shared control platform, in which force feedback is provided to operators. The final results demonstrate that operators are able to track both force and position of end-effector, meanwhile stable force feedback is available. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper introduces a fault tolerant control approach based on direct compensation of the power, which is generated by a fault source located at the input of the controlled system. The power of the fault is estimated from the energy balance of the controlled system. The control law, proposed for fault accommodation, depends directly on the estimated fault power and it is formulated such to avoid large, unimplementable control signals that could appear in some specific operating conditions of the system. The method is directly applicable to guarantee the stability of bilateral control systems in the presence of communication delay between the master and the slave. The resulting control algorithm is an extended Passivity Observer - Passivity Controller scheme, which guarantees that the magnitudes of the control signals always remain in an admissible domain. Simulations and realtime experimental measurements are presented to show the efficiency of the proposed control scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper addresses the problem of stable bilateral teleoperation in the presence of communication delay by taking into consideration that the outputs of the controllers, which are applied to guarantee the passivity of the teleoperator, are bounded. The velocity and force signals in a teleoperation system are bounded due to the actuator saturation or artificial bounds can also be introduced for the safety and convenience of the human operator. The problem is treated in the time domain passivity approach. It is shown that the passivity of the bilateral teleoperation can be guaranteed with bounded control signals if the force and velocity signals that are sent over the communication channels are also bounded. Real-time experimental measurements were performed to demonstrate the efficiency of the presented method. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a user study on an implemented Internet-based teleoperation robot named TeleBot. The objectives of the study were to: a) test the usability of TeleBot, b) compare two commonly used devices to control TeleBot, and c) understand further development and requirement of TeleBot by examining how operators use TeleBot to complete a specific task. A task-oriented user study that included navigating TeleBot to a specific location and use TeleBot's arm to touch a “X” marking placed on the door, was designed. Eight participants performed the same task using two different types of device. Both objective and subjective data were collected during the study. The results indicated that a) TeleBot demonstrated a certain level of usability; b) showed that the gamepad was slightly easier to use for teleoperation and finally c) deduced further developmental area for TeleBot. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We present experimental results on semi-autonomous control of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), which makes it possible for multiple robots to follow teleoperated command and maintain the formation of them with collision avoidance at the same time. The implemented results are presented with theoretical preliminaries, and we use three Tri-Roller Observing Tracers (TROTs) in our implementation. It is omni-directional mobile robot which has natural-born agility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When using commercialized robot assisted laparoscopic such as Da Vinci, surgeon has met some problem to depend only on the information by visual feedback. To solve this problem, haptic function is required. In order to realize the haptic teleoperation system, force feedback and bilateral control system are needed. The previous researches showed that the perturbation value estimated by sliding perturbation observer(SPO) followed a reaction force loaded on the surgical robot instrument well. This paper addresses a bilateral control which is performed to realize haptic teleoperation based on this estimated force. The experiment results shows that a torque and force sensorless teleoperation system can be implemented using bilateral control structure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we describe remote manipulator systems for use in pyroprocessing facilities where direct access to an in-cell by human workers is not possible because of the toxicity of argon gas. These remote manipulator systems can be classified into two types, i.e., a BDSM (Bridge transported Dual arm Servo-Manipulators) and a Telemanipulator, depending on the environment they are installed in. The BDSM is an electrically driven manipulator, whereas the Telemanipulator is a mechanically driven manipulator. The remote manipulator systems of the BDSM and Telemanipulator were developed and installed in the pyroprocessing facilities at the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, and are currently in use for remote operation and maintenance work of processing equipment and auxiliary devices for pyroprocessing technology development. We present the developments, installation and in-situ operation of remote manipulator systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Robotics is a major field that is being researched for decades. With the use of robotic technology, applications of the microscopic level to the places where the human cannot reach are facilitated. When it comes to the larger robots, large actuators and drives have to be used to obtain the desired amount of power and the force or torque needed. As the electric motors have a limitation of torque output with its capacity, the most desirable way is to use the gears. However this introduces large inertia, backlash and friction to the system. If the system is used for the transmission of haptic information in bilaterally controlled systems, it greatly deteriorates the performance of the system and necessitates a compensation for the backlash caused by the gears. This paper introduces a method to compensate the backlash generated by the geared system. This method uses two identical counter operating drives per joint to compensate the backlash effect. Experiments are carried out for the proposed method to validate its accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a robotic welding teleoperation system that can learn the skilled welder's behavior and transfer human intelligence into welding robots. In this system a 6-DOF robot arm is equipped with a compact 3D weld pool sensing system. The motion of the human welder movement is tracked accurately by the Leap sensor. A predictive control algorithm is proposed to control the speed of the robot arm movement. Tracking experiments are conducted to track pre-set movement with varying speed and human hand movement. It is found that the robot with the proposed speed control algorithm is able to track human hand movement with acceptable accuracy. A foundation is thus established to realize welding teleoperation and transfer human intelligence to the welding robot. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a surgical master-slave tele-operation system for percutaneous interventional procedures under continuous magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) guidance. This system consists of a piezoelectrically actuated slave robot for needle placement with integrated fiber optic force sensor utilizing Fabry-Perot interferometry (FPI) sensing principle. The sensor flexure is optimized and embedded to the slave robot for measuring needle insertion force. A novel, compact opto-mechanical FPI sensor interface is integrated into an MRI robot control system. By leveraging the complementary features of pneumatic and piezoelectric actuation, a pneumatically actuated haptic master robot is also developed to render force associated with needle placement interventions to the clinician. An aluminum load cell is implemented and calibrated to close the impedance control loop of the master robot. A force-position control algorithm is developed to control the hybrid actuated system. Teleoperated needle insertion is demonstrated under live MR imaging, where the slave robot resides in the scanner bore and the user manipulates the master beside the patient outside the bore. Force and position tracking results of the master-slave robot are demonstrated to validate the tracking performance of the integrated system. It has a position tracking error of 0.318mm and sine wave force tracking error of 2.227N. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents the experimental validation of software-based safety features implemented during the control of a prosthetic limb in self-feeding tasks with a human patient. To ensure safe operation during patient controlled movements of the limb, velocity-based virtual fixtures are constructed with respect to the patient's location and orientation relative to the limb. These imposed virtual fixtures or safety zones modulate the allowable movement direction and speed of the limb to ensure patient safety during commanded limb trajectories directed toward the patient's body or environmental obstacles. In this implementation, the Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL) will be controlled by a quadriplegic patient using implanted intracortical electrodes. These virtual fixtures leverage existing sensors internal to the MPL and operate in conjunction with the existing limb control. Validation of the virtual fixtures was conducted by executing a recorded set of limb control inputs while collecting both direct feedback from the limb sensors and ground truth measurements of the limb configuration using a Vicon tracking system. Analysis of the collected data indicates that the system performed within the limitations prescribed by the imposed virtual fixtures. This successful implementation and validation enabled the approved clinical use of the MPL system for a neural controlled self-feeding task. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Human-in-the loop robotic systems have the potential to handle complex tasks in unstructured environments, by combining the cognitive skills of a human operator with autonomous tools and behaviors. Along these lines, we present a system for remote human-in-the-loop grasp execution. An operator uses a computer interface to visualize a physical robot and its surroundings, and a point-and-click mouse interface to command the robot. We implemented and analyzed four different strategies for performing grasping tasks, ranging from direct, real-time operator control of the end-effector pose, to autonomous motion and grasp planning that is simply adjusted or confirmed by the operator. Our controlled experiment (N=48) results indicate that people were able to successfully grasp more objects and caused fewer unwanted collisions when using the strategies with more autonomous assistance. We used an untethered robot over wireless communications, making our strategies applicable for remote, human-in-the-loop robotic applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research is concerned with an improvement on a teleoperation system of robot arm with visual servo mechanism by target selection. The teleoperation system considered in this research is mainly divided into operational side and working side. In the operational side, the command to realize the rough motion of the working robot arm in the working side is generated manually by using not only a robot arm but also a joystick. Web cameras are introduced for the human operator to grasp the circumstance around the working robot arm. The generated command in the operational side is transmitted into the working side through the Internet. The visual servo mechanism is also considered to realize the accurate motion of the working robot arm by a USB camera. In the vision system, the position of a target object is specified to generate the command for the accurate motion by template matching technique with an image obtained from the mouse dragging during operation. Experimental results are shown to confirm the effectiveness of the teleoperation system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, a teleoperation system using inverse dynamic control is implemented with two PHANToM Omni haptic devices connected in a master-slave configuration. The inverse dynamic control is designed to linearize the nonlinear system and achieve motion tracking between the two devices. This paper provides the kinematic model and dynamic equation of PHANToM Omni haptic device used for constructing the inverse dynamic controller. Experimental results demonstrate the improved trajectory tracking performance of the teleoperated system with an inverse dynamic controller when compared with a conventional PID controller. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper describes the proposed humanoid robot teleoperation system capable of task learning through teleoperation. The system is based on the task rule extraction from the data acquired by monitoring a human operator during the teleoperation process. The basic information about teleoperation systems, history, applications and current trends are provided in the first part of the paper. The second part of this paper is dedicated to the architecture and software implementation of the proposed system. The last two sections are dedicated to the conducted experiments and conclusion of the project and the possible improvements considered for the future work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most of the works in the field of teleoperation of humanoid robots do not use the whole-body of the robot to perform some task. This work treats the teleoperation of a humanoid robot through the recognition of human motions by using a natural interface mechanism. We propose the use of simple mathematical techniques to allow, in a satisfactory level, the user order in real-time a robot to mimic a person, to walk, to manipulate the environment with its hands and to perform some predetermined behaviors. Also, we provide an appropriate discussion around the findings of this research. The results of the experiments show a satisfactory performance for the system developed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We present a intuitive teleoperation scheme by using human gesture and multimodal multi-user human-robot interface. Further, in order to deal with the dynamic daily environment, we apply haptic point cloud rendering and virtual collaboration and all these functions are achieved by portable hardwares which is called “mobile iSpace”. First, a surrounding environment of a teleoperated robot is captured and reconstructed as the 3D point cloud using a depth camera. Virtual world is then generated from the 3D point cloud, and a virtual teleoperated robot model is placed in there. An user uses their own whole body gesture to teleoperate the humanoid type robot. The gesture is captured by the depth camera placed in user-side in real time. And the user has the visual and vibrotactile feedback at the same time by using a head mounted display and a vibrotactile glove. All these system components e.g. the human user, the teleoperated robot and the feedback devices are connected with the Internet-based virtual collaboration system to support a flexible accessibility. So eventually, this makes possible that users can access the remote placed robot whenever and wherever they want. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a program interface for a robot control with a haptic device. A program was developed, which connects a PC and the haptic device using FireWire protocol, and by TCP/IP protocol with a KUKA KR 5 robot. This program's package also influences the movements of a robot and executes the program by signal processing. It enables an exchange of data between the robot controller and outside peripherials in real-time using Ethernet. The information between the server and a client is transferred in the form of a XML file. The emphasis of the presented paper is dedicated to the developement of the program's interface, which can be devided into three segments: the server program which runs on a PC and connects the PC with the haptic device using FireWire protocol, the developement of the client program, which runs on a robot computer (KRC Kuka Robot Controller) and a subprogram that runs on the server and connects the haptic device with a server. The program's interface enables data acquisition from the haptic device usingFireWire protocol, and a transfer of data from the server-program using the protocol TCP/IP to the KRC robot-controller. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we propose a novel control scheme for bilateral teleoperation of n degree-of-freedom (DOF) nonlinear robotic systems with time-varying communication delay. We consider that the human operator contains a constant force on the local manipulator. The local and remote manipulators are coupled using state convergence control scheme. By choosing a Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional, we show that the local-remote teleoperation system is asymptotically stable. It is also shown that, in the case of reliable communication protocols, the proposed scheme guarantees that the remote manipulator tracks the delayed trajectory of the local manipulator. The time delay of communication channel is assumed to be unknown and randomly time varying, but the upper bounds of the delay interval and the derivative of the delay are assumed to be known. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper intoduces a preliminary study on a new control decomposition criterion for collaborative teleoper-ation systems — field of view deficiency. This criterion represents the amount of visual information available to operators. As a tool for such decomposition we introduce a dominance distribution matrix — a more flexible approach to dominance distribution than a well-known scalar dominance factor concept. We introduce collaborative teleoperation architecture, based on field of view deficiency criterion and apply it to experimental dual-master/single-slave teleoperation system. Experimental study demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Telesurgery has come to the forefront because of many merits such as a small incision, less bleeding and a short period of hospitalization. By means of internet, telesurgery is practical even the master and the slave are not physically in the same place. Internet, however, causes communication constraints such as time-varying delay and packet loss which induce instability and performance degradations in teleoperation systems. In this paper, we consider teleoperation systems including bilateral communications with asynchronous packet loss and time-varying delay. We define teleoper-ation sytsems as polytopic linear differential inclusions (PLDIs) to cope with switchings between subsystems which are divided by the status of communication channels. A sufficient condition which guarantees asymptotic stability and H∞ performance is derived for teleoperation systems modeled as PLDIs. Then, we propose a H∞ control design method, using linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper deals with a haptic teleoperation, that can significantly improve the execution over a wide area of tasks. The latter can be found in a medicine, military, space exploration and many others. The paper describes the control algorithm implementation for a high performance haptic teleoperation. The algorithm is tested by a 2-DOF experimental haptic laboratory system. The Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) contributes to the bilateral teleoperator performance, therefore, transparency, stability, and robustness can be increased. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A small humanoid robot with a teleoperation system using 3G communication network is present in this paper. Considering the requirement of dynamic environment and hardware limitations of small humanoid, the teleoperation system was designed using 3G communication network, which has a good performance both on the long-distance operation and the communication speed. Then an improved walking planning method is explored on this robot. Most of conventional walking planning methods can not fit to the low computation performance of small humanoid nor the real-time teleoperation requirement. In order to solve this problem, an online walking planning method with has been presented in this paper. There are two primary advantages compared with conventional walking planning methods. First, the new online walking planning can realize walking based on real-time tasks due to its short control period. Secondly, the reduced computation and walking data can fit to the hardware limit of the small humanoid. The effectiveness of the proposed walking planning method was confirmed by experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents two simple approaches for fusing together motion and muscle (EMG) sensors to enhance control. The first approach fuses Gyro and EMG sensors to provide relative control, while the second approach fuses EMG, Accelerometer and Magnetometer for absolute control. A wearable prototype armband was developed which incorporates all the sensors. The armband enables any user with some level of yaw and pitch arm movements, as well as arm muscle voluntary contraction, to control an electrical device like a computer, a robotic arm, or a mobile phone. Simple data calculation from the motion sensors outputted pitch and yaw, while EMG threshold based techniques were used for a virtual enter button. The sensor fusion aims to create intuitive control, while not overcomplicating the design process. The interface was connected to a robotic arm and compared against other classical industrial control approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A large number of remote manipulation system has been developed with the development of the robotics, this paper describes a brief account of advance on the teleoperation system, on dealing with the problems arose in the application, such as the effects of stability and transparency caused by time delay of the system, the various control methods and theories proposed recent years are summarized, and the advantages and disadvantages of the various methods are also given. Some new ideas about the research for control strategy and method of teleoperation are proposed for further study. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper describes the use of the Microsoft Kinect for building three dimensional maps for use in teleoperation. Though these maps are being used for teleoperation in this paper, these map building techniques could also be applied in localization for navigation or robot path planning. The Kinect is a relatively new depth sensor that has become popular in the field of robotics, often replacing significantly more expensive systems like tilting laser range finders and stereoscopic vision systems. Two main sources of error in the map making are investigated, random and systematic error from the depth sensor and uncertainty in the navigation solution of the vehicle. Systematic and random error in the Kinect has previously been described in the literature [1] and this paper looks at how these errors affect the users ability to do mapping and offers some practical solutions. The teleoperation system design around this map making process is presented, and it builds on existing work [2] using octrees as the storage for the maps. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper describes the design and evaluation of a new platform created in order to improve the learning experience of bilateral control algorithms in teleoperation. This experimental platform, developed at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, is used by the students of the Master on Automation and Robotics in the practices of the subject called “Telerobotics and Teleoperation”. The main objective is to easily implement different control architectures in the developed platform and evaluate them under different conditions to better understand the main advantages and drawbacks of each control scheme. So, the student's tasks are focused on adjusting the control parameters of the predefined controllers and designing new ones to analyze the changes in the behavior of the whole system. A description of the subject, main topics and the platform constructed are detailed in the paper. Furthermore, the methodology followed in the practices and the bilateral control algorithms are presented. Finally, the results obtained in the experiments with students are also shown. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Virtual modeling and simulation technology about teleoperation without time delay for Dual-arm Free Flying Space Robots (DFFSR) have been mainly researched. First, present research situation on teleoperation time delay problem has been described. Then, solution to time delay based on Virtual Reality (VR) Preview technology has been presented. Finally, teleoperation system for DFFSR without time delay based on VR has been developed and simulation experiment has been carried on. The simulation results show that VR technology has taken very much important play in effectively overcoming problem of teleoperation time delay for DFFSR. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]