An implementation of seamless human-robot interaction for pipeline welding telerobotics

Abstract

Although welding is an important technology for nuclear pipeline maintenance, it cannot be performed effectively up to date because of the robot can not be fully autonomous. This paper presents a human-robot cooperation telerobotics system for pipeline welding in a nuclear environment. The implementation of human-robot welding systems can be extremely challenging when the robot is not directly controlled by the human. Depending on the task, the interaction mode is composed of continuous manual, semi-autonomous or autonomous. To address the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) issues in such a system, a concept of seamless HRI is introduced. The main idea seamless HRI is to design a telerobotics welding system that allows a shift from manual to autonomous operation, dynamically, via different human-robot roles and relationships. These roles are Master-Slave, Supervisor-Subordinate, Peer-Peer, Teacher-Learner and Full Autonomous mode by the robot. The theoretical foundations for seamless HRI are introduced. An implementation of the concept is presented and experimental results show the system get through the pipeline welding. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.