Supervised autonomy: a paradigm for teleoperating mobile robots

Abstract

In this paper we propose a new paradigm for teleoperating a mobile robot. Our teleoperation paradigm is made up of five major components: "self-preservation"; "instructive feedback"; "qualitative instructions"; "qualitative explanations"; and a "user interface". Our aim is to provide a mobile robot with autonomy while being teleoperated. Our approach can be used to combat the continuous closed-loop problem. A qualitative approach has been taken in the design of each of the components. The usefulness of our approach is demonstrated with an implementation of a user interface to teleoperate an autonomous mobile robot equipped with a vision based navigation system. In this paper we describe the implementation of our teleoperation system.