Development of an indirect-type teleoperation interface for biped humanoid robots

This paper presents a user interface for teleoperating a biped humanoid robot and discusses the interface design. Teleoperation interfaces can be classified as either direct- or indirect-type, and the latter is employed by our interface because our goal is to use humanoid robots for disaster response, and the indirect-type interfaces have advantages for such applications. The basic design of our interface and concrete functions for operating the robot are described. The interface visualizes the last state of the robot and its environment, and the operation is performed by executing commands, including robot state acquisition, measurement, walking, reaching, and manipulation. Communication between the interface and the robot is requested only when a command is executed. The developed interface was tested with the HRP-2 robot and two example tasks, i.e., walking on uneven terrain and rotating a valve. We verified that the robot was able to complete the tasks by teleoperation using our interface.