Systematic Framework for Teleoperation with Haptic Shared Control

Teleoperation – performing tasks remotely by controlling a robot – permits the execution of many important tasks that would otherwise be infeasible for people to carry out directly. Nuclear accident recovery, deep water operations, and remote satellite servicing are just three examples. Remote task execution principally offers two extremes for control of the teleoperated robot: direct tele manipulation, which provides flexible task execution, but requires continuous operator attention, and automation, which lacks flexibility but offers superior performance in predictable and repetitive tasks (where the human assumes a supervisory role). This dissertation explores a third option, termed hap- tic shared control, which lies in-between these two extremes, and in which the control forces exerted by the human operator are continuously merged with ‘guidance’ forces generated by the automation. In a haptic shared control system, the operators continually contribute to the task execution, keeping their skills and situational awareness. It is common practice to design the haptic shared control systems heuristically, by iteratively adjusting them to the satisfaction of the system designer, primarily based on human-in- the-loop experiments. In this dissertation, we aim to improve this design and evaluation process. Our goal is to follow a system-theoretic approach and formalize the design procedures of haptic shared control systems applied to teleoperation. Such a formalization should provide designers of future HSC systems with a better understanding and more control over the design process, with the ultimate goal of making the HSC systems safer, easier and more intuitive to use, and overall to perform better. The research goal of this dissertation has been divided into three parts.