Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-2021
Publication Title
Applied Sciences (Switzerland)
Abstract
Teleoperated systems enable human control of robotic proxies and are particularly amenable to inaccessible environments unsuitable for autonomy. Examples include emergency response, underwater manipulation, and robot assisted minimally invasive surgery. However, teleoperation architectures have been predominantly employed in manipulation tasks, and are thus only useful when the robot is within reach of the task. This work introduces the idea of extending teleoperation to enable online human remote control of legged robots, or telelocomotion, to traverse challenging terrain. Traversing unpredictable terrain remains a challenge for autonomous legged locomotion, as demonstrated by robots commonly falling in high-profile robotics contests. Telelocomotion can reduce the risk of mission failure by leveraging the high-level understanding of human operators to command in real-time the gaits of legged robots. In this work, a haptic telelocomotion interface was developed. Two within-user studies validate the proof-of-concept interface: (i) The first compared basic interfaces with the haptic interface for control of a simulated hexapedal robot in various levels of traversal complexity; (ii) the second presents a physical implementation and investigated the efficacy of the proposed haptic virtual fixtures. Results are promising to the use of haptic feedback for telelocomotion for complex traversal tasks.
Keywords
Haptic feedback, Haptic virtual fixtures, Human–robot interaction, Robot locomotion, Telelocomotion, Teleoperation
Volume
11
Issue
1
First Page
1
Last Page
20
DOI
10.3390/app11010194
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Rights
© 2020 by the authors
Recommended Citation
Huang, Kevin; Subedi, Divas; Mitra, Rahul; Yung, Isabella; Boyd, Kirkland; Aldrich, Edwin; and Chitrakar, Digesh, "Telelocomotion—Remotely Operated Legged Robots" (2021). Engineering: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/egr_facpubs/133
Comments
Archived as published. Open access article.