Teleprograming: Capturing the intention of the human operator

Abstract

The presence of a significant time delay in the communications between the local and remote zone of a teleoperated system causes two undesirables effects: (1) dynamic instability and (2) unmanageability. Instability usually appears in bilateral control schemes as a consequence of force feedback and makes the system useless with 0.1 or more seconds of time delay. Robot teleprogramming was proposed as an intermediate solution between supervised control systems and direct teleoperation when a significant delay appears in the communications between the local and the remote zones. In this chapter a teleprogramming architecture with an analyzer for the operators intention is proposed and tested. A task analyzer observes the movements made by the operator in a virtual environment. Through the force and geometric information obtained (attending only to geometric features), a set of symbolic commands are generated. These commands are then transmitted to an interpreter which pipes them through the communication system to the remote zone. The remote system receives and translates the information to absolute references in the remote model that is continuously actualized by the perception system. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.