Assistive Telerobotics and Intuitive Interaction

Telerobotics, i.e., the area of robotics where humans teleoperate robotic agents to interact with environments, is one of the earliest forms of assistive robotics. Telerobotics offers important possibilities in terms of human safety and health, e.g., allowing robots to be operated remotely in demanding and dangerous situations, e.g., nuclear industry, disaster response and search-n-rescue, marine environments, and chemical and oil-and-gas industry, helping human workers to safely interact with such application domains. To be controlled by human operators and to operate in made-for-human, unstructured environments, telerobotics systems not only require advanced features in locomotion, manipulation, control, and perception but also intuitive interaction interfaces, which are the cornerstone of accurate and effective performance. It requires high fidelity in controlling the actions of the robot as well as perceiving (vision, haptics, auditory, and other sensory feedback) the operational environment. This chapter presents assistive telerobotics , and the intuitive interaction that it demands, as an important thread of assistive robotics. It then uses remote robotic telemanipulation as an illustrative use-case to capture the technological challenges and the novel solutions in addressing those challenges. Through the lens of intuitive interaction, this chapter focuses on four aspects that play an important role in enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency in telerobotics: (i) control, for the appropriate mapping between human gestures and robot motion; (ii) visual interfaces, for intuitive visualization, freedom of user viewpoint selection, and natural control; (iii) remote 3D vision, for intelligent remote scene understanding, streaming, and rendering; (iv) haptic interaction with the environment. Taken together, the goal is to enhance the situational awareness of human operators, thereby assisting them in better controlling the perception–action loop and performing the telerobotics task in an intuitive and efficient manner.