Event Location: GHC 6501

Abstract: Many applications today involving mobile robots require human control because the task to solve or the environment to move in is too complicated for existing fully autonomous systems. While computers today are already better than humans at controlling machines at a low level and can provide operators with a higher level of interaction, humans are still much better than computers at reasoning about goals and plans. “What do I need to do?” and “How could it be done?” are questions operators can usually answer more efficiently for a robot operating in partially unknown environments.

Remote controlling a fully or partially “out of sight” robot is complicated and requires experienced operators who understand the physics of the controlled machine, the environment it operates in and the capabilities of the control interface. Today, most remote controlled robots are still operated within line of sight of the operator, or, if this is not possible or desirable, feedback from the robot is, with a few exceptions, limited to a camera stream.

We believe that a combination of additional, task specific sensors, together with more sophisticated feedback algorithms would greatly increase an operator’s ability to complete a teleoperation task quickly, safely and with reduced operator mistakes. Furthermore it could allow operators to complete tasks that are more difficult than rudimentary navigation or manipulation. We are especially interested in designing and evaluating haptic control/feedback strategies for controlling mobile robots and manipulators since we believe that operators could benefit significantly from the right kind of haptic feedback.

We propose a series of novel haptic feedback controllers based on our Asymmetric Vibration and TAGIT algorithms. We hypothesize that the proposed controllers will increase an operator’s ability to interact with a remote robot compared to what is currently the state of the art. All of our controllers will be compared against each other and against existing systems in a series of psychophysics user studies to quantify the effects of each controller during real world teleoperation tasks.

Committee:Ralph Hollis, Chair

Roberta Klatzky

David Wettergreen

Hong Z. Tan, Purdue University