Remote intervention, robot autonomy, and teleprogramming: generic concepts and real-world application cases

The authors consider the class of intervention robots that have to perform tasks in remote environments which may impose painful, harsh or utterly dangerous conditions to humans. They informally characterize this class of problems and briefly discuss several basic concepts which underlie the current approaches. The remote autonomous robot concept that they have developed fulfills the requirements deduced of these basic ideas. The authors illustrate the real world possibilities of the concept by describing the features of two application projects (AMR, VAP) that they believe to be significant and demonstrative. The last section is devoted to the description of a generic experiment carried on with ADAM, an all-terrain full size rover. It includes the system architecture implementation and some of the experimental results