Representation and Inference of User Intention for Internet Robot

Teleoperated robots often have unpredictable behaviors due to uncertain time delay in data transmissions over Internet. The robot cannot accomplish commands or actions issued by the remote operator in time, which severely impairs its reliability and efficiency. This paper investigates the strategy of modeling the operator´s intention online by the teleoperated robot via the commands it received. Having deduced the intention, the robot could identify and thus autonomously accomplish the corresponding task without frequent interactions with the operator. Therefore data transmissions between the operator and the robot for task realization and performance evaluation can be minimized, and the impact of uncertain transmission delays on the efficiency of the entire system can be reduced. The robot, as an efficient manipulation tool controlled over the Internet, could be endowed with specified capability to improve its performance in the distributed environment. Intention of controlling and operating the robot is first expressed in planar or spatial grids and then incrementally inferred based on Bayesian techniques. Experiments with a teleoperated office robot show the validity and feasibility of the proposed method.