DIH HERO Project Sandro
ROSE demonstrates long distance teleoperation.
Challenge
ROSE is an innovative robot which provides support in ADL tasks. This alleviates the workload of the care workers, which in modern days is very high. As a result, the care workers will be able to shift their focus to nursing and helping people in need, instead of being occupied with non-related tasks.
Solution
During project SANDRo developments revolve around autonomous capabilities such as navigation and manipulation, human-machine interaction in terms of interactive conversations, telecommunication and mainly “human-in-the-loop” teleoperation. Primarily in care environments, which are dynamic and unpredictable, a semi-autonomous approach is the key to success.
Contribution HIT
Our teleoperation module contains a cockpit (graphical interface), where the operator sees what the robot sees, and an extra channel facilitating back and forth communication of information, which ensures intuitiveness of teleoperation. This is because we
- make use of a haptic device which sends kinematically similar position and orientation commands to the robot arm in the same frame of reference
- forces measured on the robot side (i.e., when it interacts with its environment) are fed back to the operator.
One of the strengths of teleoperation is that it facilitates so called telepresence, which means that the human operator manipulates the environment from distance through the robot as if she/he was physically present. The challenge one faces is that the performance of the teleoperation module depends on the network quality, which in turn depends on distance information has to travel.