Telerobotics: Towards Extending Your Sensing and Hands into a Remote Reality

Abstract

The problem addressed is control of robots and/or sensing, in workspaces at remote locations. Topics taken up in this plenary talk includes laser sensing, scene interpretation, telecommands for local autonomy, research issues especially for multirobot systems. Applications includes aerospace testing in north Sweden. Telecommands are studied for high level control of robots over a communication channel with a non-neglectable time delay, time jitters and variable bandwidth. The sensors onboard the robot are a time-of-flight range measuring laser and a video camera. A few images are used by the operator for interpreting the scene. From the interpretations of the workspace around the robot, the operator specifies interactively the sequence of individual operations during a composite task. Each telecommand is then executed autonomously by closing the feedback loop between the robot and the objects in the surrounding workspace.