A Framework for Customizable Multi-User Teleoperated Control

Abstract

Traditional teleoperation (leader/follower) systems primarily focus on one operator controlling one remote robot, but as robots become ubiquitous, there is an increasing need for multiple operators, including autonomous agents, to collaboratively control multiple robots. However, existing teleoperation frameworks do not inherently support the variety of possible collaborations, such as multiple operators, each with an input device (leader), controlling a robot and camera or different degrees of freedom of a single robot (follower). The same concept applies to teleoperating robots in a simulation environment through physical input devices. In this letter, we extend our novel simulation framework that is capable of incorporating multiple input devices asynchronously with a real-time dynamic simulation to incorporate a customizable shared control. For this purpose, we have identified and implemented a sufficient set of coordinate frames to encapsulate the pairing of multiple leaders, followers and cameras in a shared asynchronous manner with force feedback. We demonstrate the utility of this framework in accelerating user training, ease of learning, and enhanced task completion times through shared control by a supervisor.