Design of a haptic joystick for shared robot control

Autonomous mobile robots are often equipped with sophisticated sensors designed to provide the system with a model of its surrounding environment. This information can then be used for making task-related decisions and conveying information back to the operator. To date, autonomous systems tend to exceed at well defined tasks such as navigation, planning, and obstacle avoidance, usually in fairly structured environments. However, for many current mobile robotic systems, teleoperated control is still largely favored, in part due to a human operator's sophisticated ability to reason about unstructured environments [6]. Introducing varying levels of autonomy into a teleoperated system allows for a human operator to make high level decisions while leaving other tasks to the autonomy [5]. With this technique, problems can arise when the human operator does not understand why a part of the system they do not have direct control over is behaving in a particular manner (see Figure 1), usually due to poor situation awareness [1]. Attempts have been made to correct these issues by displaying additional sensor and system state information in the operator control unit (e.g., [8]).