HUMAN MACHINE COOPERATIVE TELEROBOTICS

Abstract

Due to the increasing number of work sites that are hazardous or merely inaccessible, remote manipulation has become more and more important. Nuclear, underwater, and space applications, exemplify a few of the dangerous environments in which work may be desired, while micromanipulation, which has become of more interest lately, is an example of an inherently inaccessible environment. The past 50 yr have seen great advances in remote manipulation technology, from the pioneering work of Ray Goertz in the 1950s to the ongoing development at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) of the modular light-duty utility arm (MLDUA), which is a long-reach manipulator for use in the cleanup of the waste storage tanks. Mainly, research has either focused on the improvement of manually operated remote manipulators or teleoperators, in which a human is an integral part of the control loop, or autonomous robots, which have the required decision-making capability and sensors. However, in the past few years, it has become increasingly evident that there are limitations in each of these modalities, which make them individually unsuited for certain tasks. While a human operator may be required to make high-level decisions, fatigue and tedium can result from repetitive tasks. On the other hand,more » computers can provide fast and efficient operation but are limited by their currently inadequate decision-making abilities as well as inaccuracies in the utilized sensors. An ideal teleoperator would be one in which the human is involved in the operation only to the extent that high-level decisions must be made and corrections must be made to account for inaccuracies in the sensors. Responsibilities such as gross alignment and repetitive motions would be delegated to computer control.« less