Orbital Head-Mounted Display: A Novel Interface for Viewpoint Control during Robot Teleoperation in Cluttered Environments

Robotic teleoperation is used in various applications, including the nuclear industry, where the experience and intelligence of a human operator are necessary for making complex decisions that are beyond the autonomy of robots. Human-robot interfaces that help strengthen an operators situational awareness without inducing excessive cognitive...

Probabilistic Online Robot Learning via Teleoperated Demonstrations for Remote Elderly Care

Daily household tasks involve manipulation in cluttered and unpredictable environments and service robots require complex skills and adaptability to perform such tasks. To this end, we developed a teleoperated online learning approach with a novel skill refinement method, where the operator can make refinements to the initially trained skill...

A Multi-Modal Feedback Communication Interface for Human Working Posture Adjustments

This paper studies non-physical feedback mechanisms to guide human workers toward ergonomic body postures. Specifically, the focus is to solve the tasks that involve no direct physical interaction between the human and the robotic system, therefore tactile guidance by the robot body is not feasible. We propose a multi-modal ergonomic posture...

Foot-operated Tele-impedance Interface for Robot Manipulation Tasks in Interaction with Unpredictable Environments

Tele-impedance increases interaction performance between a robotic tool and unstructured/unpredictable en-vironments during teleoperation. However, the existing tele-impedance interfaces have several ongoing issues, such as long calibration times and various obstructions for the human operator. In addition, they are all designed to be controlled...

Arbitration of Authority in Physical Human-Robot Collaboration with Combined Preventive and Reactive Fatigue Management

We present a method for arbitration between human and robot involvement in a collaborative physical task execution based on ergonomic metrics. The existing methods for ergonomic control of physical human-robot collaboration perform the real-Time arbitration primarily based on a single type of ergonomic metric. The novelty of our approach is...

A Semi-Autonomous Tele-Impedance Method based on Vision and Voice Interfaces

In tele-impedance the human can control the impedance of the remote robot through various interfaces, in addition to controlling the motion. While this can improve the performance of the remote robot in unpredictable and unstructured environments, it can add more workload to the human operator compared to the classic teleoperation. This paper...

Independently Commanding Size, Shape and Orientation of Robot Endpoint Stiffness in Tele-Impedance by Virtual Ellipsoid Interface

The existing state-of-the-art interfaces for commanding a remote robot's endpoint stiffness ellipsoid in tele-impedance lack the ability to independently control its size, shape and orientation or they are not easily to implement due to the use of physiological signals, such as electromyography, to control the endpoint stiffness. We propose a...

Design and Evaluation of Haptic Interface Wiggling Method for Remote Commanding of Variable Stiffness Profiles

Unlike many traditional stiff position-controlled robots, new collaborative robots interact with humans and operate in an environment that is often unpredictable and unknown. For safe and effective executions of manipulation tasks within such an environment, the robot requires to modulate its compliance. Therefore, the human operator must have a...

The Force-Feedback Coupling Effect in Bilateral Tele-Impedance

In this paper, we introduce and explore a concept called coupling effect, which pertains to the influence of force feedback on the commanded stiffness that is voluntarily controlled by the operator through the stiffness interface during bilateral tele-impedance. The degree of coupling effect depends on the type of interface used to control...