Assisted Telemanipulation: A Stack-Of-Tasks Approach to Remote Manipulator Control

Abstract

This article presents an approach for assisted teleoperation of a robot arm, formulated within a real-time stack-of-tasks (SoT)whole-body motion control framework. The approach leverages the hierarchical nature of the SoT framework to integrate operator commands with assistive tasks, such as joint limit and obstacle avoidance or automatic gripper alignment. Thereby some aspects of the teleoperation problem are delegated to the controller and carried out autonomously. The key contributions of this work are two-fold: the first is a method for unobtrusive integration of autonomy in a telemanip-ulation system; and the second is a user study evaluation of the proposed system in the context of teleoperated pick-and-place tasks. The proposed approach of assistive control was found to result in higher grasp success rates and shorter trajectories than achieved through manual control, without incurring additional cognitive load to the operator.