Mechanisms for collaborative teleoperation with a team of cooperative robots

Abstract

Purpose – This paper aims to present a teleoperation system that allows one to control a group of mobile robots in a collaborative manner. In order to show the capabilities of the collaborative teleoperation system, it seeks to present a task where the operator collaborates with a robot team to explore a remote environment in a coordinated manner. The system implements human‐robot interaction by means of natural language interfaces, allowing one to teleoperate multiple mobile robots in an unknown, unstructured environment. With the supervision of the operator, the robot team builds a map of the environment with a vision‐based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) technique. The approach is well suited for search and rescue tasks and other applications where the operator may guide the exploration of the robots to certain areas in the map.