FinalReport: Remote Manipulation for D&D Exhibiting Teleautonomy and Telecollaboration

Teleoperation has found much application in today’s society. While its benefits make it advantageous in many situations, teleoperation also introduces new challenges. For example, the operator is forced to work with limited sensory feedback such as that from video cameras. Second, the mapping from what the operator inputs at the master manipulandum to what the operator sees the slave robot do can be mentally challenging and tiresome. Finally, timedelay that may exist between master and slave makes forcefeedback more confusing than helpful. In this paper, we present techniques to improve teleoperation performance by making better use of the human’s inherent skills. We do so by minimizing the mental transformations in a teleoperation interface and by locally implementing haptic virtual surfaces via the master. The following section presents a specific teleoperation application that is the main motivation for this work. We then introduce an internet teleoperation testbed that incorporates our techniques, and discuss seven lessons learned during the creation and use of that testbed. Finally, we present our conclusions with avenues for future research.