Teleoperation of semi-autonomous robots through uncertain environments

Robot navigation tasks are usually decomposed into sequential sub-tasks, thus requiring a hierarchical design of sub-systems governed by multiple decision and control loops. In practice, people are the experts in making high-level decisions based on environmental knowledge. However, obtaining the local, real-time environment information is difficult by ourselves, especially in unreachable or dangerous environments. On the contrary, robots are good at achieving lower-level tasks such as building a cost map and detecting nearby obstacles. Therefore, teleoperation is used to coordinate strategic human brains and faithful robot sensors and actuators, providing an information-sharing protocol that helps to build a human-in-loop system. In this paper, we design a set of interactive Robot Operating System (ROS) based teleoperation windows for the operators to supervise the robot’s navigation through uncertain …