Collaborative teleoperation design requirements and development issues

This paper introduces a collaborative teleoperation concept to deal with task complexity, the high cost needed to enhance quality and safety, and the distribution of resources in terms of time, space and functionality. The new concept is supported by the use of shared virtual environment enhanced by reality to facilitate interaction, decision making, collaborative control, monitoring, discussion, document sharing, and other activities while interacting and manipulating real facilities jointly or individually. This concept uses the Internet and Web as a platform and location independent environment to enable geographically dispersed teams that may compose of human members, and intelligent and autonomous machines. The dispersed team can perform collaboratively shared and individual tasks at specific single or distributed locations as if they were all interacting with each other in the same physical place. In addition, this paper introduces the functional and design requirements along with the development and research issues for having an efficient collaborative teleoperation.