Perception by proxy: Humans helping robots to see in a manipulation task

Robots excel at planning and performing tasks in controlled environments, but poor perception often leads to poor performance in unstructured environments. One typical way of improving robot performance is to give more control to a human operator and then design user interfaces that build the operator´s situation awareness. As an alternative, humans can support robot perception to add structure to unstructured environments. We claim that when humans support robot perception, robots can spend more time acting autonomously, which can lead to reduced operator workload and increased overall performance. We present a design process, called perception by proxy, and apply it to a simple manipulation task.