Interactive Motion Planning for a 7-DOF Robot

The use of robots in high-risk and extreme environments is crucial for tasks that are dangerous or inaccessible to humans and require high precision. Particularly in scenarios where the cost of failure is high, remote human teleoperation can be the preferred method of robot control due to the adaptability and high-level decision making of humans. Teleoperation brings many challenges including lack of accurate prior knowledge about the environment, limited views of the environment by on-board sensors, and especially inconsistent latency. 7-DOF (degrees of freedom) manipulators provide redundancy which can be utilized for increased flexibility in manipulation, and may be preferred to 6-DOF manipulators in many scenarios. The redundancy, however, must be considered by the teleoperation system. We present an extension to an existing Interactive Planning and Supervised Execution (IPSE) system that enables full teleoperation of a 7-DOF robot by encoding the redundant degree of freedom with a Shoulder-Elbow-Wrist (SEW) angle, which is user-manipulable via an SEW angle graph. Additionally, we introduce a novel user interface feature that encodes robot state information into a 2D image which is displayed directly on the SEW angle graph. We conduct a user-study which demonstrates that the addition of this SEW graph significantly reduces task completion time.