Shared Teleoperation for Nuclear Plant Robotics Using Interactive Virtual Guidance Generation and Shared Autonomy Approaches

To perform the complex tasks with telerobot system in cluttered environments such as disaster, underwater, space, the necessity of shared teleoperation is increased. However, designing an autonomy while keeping in mind the environmental uncertainty is challenging. This paper proposes shared teleoperation framework and virtual guidance generation for a human interactive shared teleoperation. The major concept of both shared teleoperation and virtual guidance generation is utilizing the cognitive ability of a human operator. In shared teleoperation case, the human intention information is provided to the autonomous system in the form of a path which is acquired by our proposed sketch method. Our novel proposed sketch method allows the operator to sketch the path on the visual feedback image of the remote environments and the information is then transmitted to the autonomous system. In virtual guidance generation, we employ human cognitive abilities to assist the computer to generate virtual guidance for teleoperation tasks. The resulting both systems are more efficient and less fatigued than direct teleoperation.