Mobile Teleoperation Interfaces with Adjustable Autonomy for Personal Service Robots

Personal service robots require a comprehensive set of perception, control, and planning skills to perform everyday tasks autonomously. While achieving full autonomy is an ongoing research topic, first real-world applications of personal robots may come into reach, if state-of-the-art autonomous capabilities are combined with the intelligence of the users in a complementary way. We report on handheld user interfaces for personal robots that allow for teleoperating the robot on three levels of autonomy: body, skill, and task control. On the higher levels, autonomous behavior of the robot relieves the user from significant workload. If autonomous execution fails, or autonomous functionality is not provided by the robot system, the user can select a lower level of autonomy to solve a task. The benefits of providing adjustable autonomy in teleoperation have been successfully demonstrated at RoboCup@Home competitions.