The researchers tried four different modes of robot teleoperation for some simple grasping tasks (shown above), each with a slightly different degree of robot autonomy. The first mode gave the human operator complete remote-control of the arm; the second asked the controller to specify waypoints for the task; the third saw the human controller specify just the final grasping position; and the fourth and final mode involved simply indicating the general area for grasping and letting the robot do the rest.
The Willow Garage researchers, which included Leila Takayama, who we named a TR35 winner this year for her work on human-robot interaction, found the two modes to be most efficient the least likely to result in mistakes. This is because it's difficult to precisely control an arm that has more joints and degrees of freedom than your own.
A completely autonomous robot could, of course, pick up an object, but it would require a lot of intelligence for it to determine, in response to commands or some general set of objectives, which object it should look for in the first place. You can imagine how this scenario might work in a manufacturing setting, for example. A remote operator could help guide various robot towards particular goals but then let it take care of the details.
Willow Garage is also exploring home-help robots that might work the same way. And, today, a Willow Garage spinout, Suitable Technologies, launched a very simple workplace telepresence system (see "Beam Yourself to Work in a Remote-controlled Body").
The video below shows a remarkable teleoperated humanoid robot developed researchers in Japan and demonstrated at this year’s Siggraph conference in Los Angeles. It might look cool, but if the Willow Garage research is any indication, future human-robot relationships are likely to be a fair bit more complicated.
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