The hidden robot concept-high level abstraction teleoperation

This paper discusses the development of new teleoperator systems. While many innovations during the last decade made teleoperation technology progress, some severe well known lacks that we enumerate still persist. With respect to some attractive solutions proposed for coping with these problems we designed a bilateral control scheme based on what we called the hidden robot concept. The teleoperator achieves tasks manually in a natural way within a virtual environment (VE). Thanks to suitable bilateral transformations, the virtual tasks are being reproduced by any slave robot within the remote site. Mainly task based, our approach is not considered like a high level task knowledge based control. Rather, we consider it like a more refined shared autonomy control with a high level abstraction interface. Three main components are developed: (i) supervision loop, (ii) bilateral transformation layer, (iii) execution loop. The approach has been validated experimentally and preliminary results as well as further work are discussed