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A shared-autonomy approach to goal detection and navigation control of mobile collaborative robots

Gholami, Soheil; Ruiz Garate, Virginia; De Momi, Elena; Ajoudani, Arash

Authors

Soheil Gholami

Virginia Ruiz Garate

Elena De Momi

Arash Ajoudani



Abstract

Autonomous goal detection and navigation control of mobile robots in remote environments can help to unload human operators from simple, monotonous tasks allowing them to focus on more cognitively stimulating actions. This can result in better task performances, while creating user-interfaces that are understandable by non-experts. However, full autonomy in unpredictable and dynamically changing environments is still far from becoming a reality. Thus, teleoperated systems integrating the supervisory role and instantaneous decision-making capacity of humans are still required for fast and reliable robotic operations. This work presents a novel shared-autonomy framework for goal detection and navigation control of mobile manipulators. The controller exploits human-gaze information to estimate the desired goal. This is used together with control-pad data to predict user intention, and to activate the autonomous control for executing a target task. Using the control-pad device, a user can react to unexpected disturbances and halt the autonomous mode at any time. By releasing the control-pad device (e.g., after avoiding an instantaneous obstacle) the controller smoothly switches back to the autonomous mode and navigates the robot towards the target. Experiments for reaching a target goal in the presence of unknown obstacles are carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed shared-autonomy framework over seven subjects. The results prove the accuracy, time-efficiency, and ease-of-use of the presented shared-autonomy control framework.

Citation

Gholami, S., Ruiz Garate, V., De Momi, E., & Ajoudani, A. (in press). A shared-autonomy approach to goal detection and navigation control of mobile collaborative robots. In 2020 29th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) (1026-1032). https://doi.org/10.1109/ro-man47096.2020.9223583

Conference Name 2020 29th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN)
Conference Location Naples, Italy
Start Date Aug 31, 2020
End Date Sep 4, 2020
Acceptance Date Jun 27, 2020
Online Publication Date Oct 14, 2020
Deposit Date Mar 10, 2021
Pages 1026-1032
Series ISSN 1944-9437
Book Title 2020 29th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN)
ISBN 9781728160764
DOI https://doi.org/10.1109/ro-man47096.2020.9223583
Public URL https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/7033357