Sunyu Wang

Sunyu Wang, Joao Ramos

Bilateral teleoperation provides humanoid robots with human planning intelligence while enabling the human to feel what the robot feels. It has the potential to transform physically capable humanoid robots into dynamically intelligent ones. However, dynamic bilateral locomotion teleoperation remains as a challenge due to the complex dynamics it involves. This work presents our initial step to tackle this challenge via the concept of wheeled humanoid robot locomotion teleoperation by body tilt. Specifically, we developed a force-feedback-capable whole-body human-machine interface (HMI), and designed a force feedback mapping and two teleoperation mappings that map the human's body tilt to the robot's velocity or acceleration. We compared the two mappings and studied the force feedback's effect via an experiment, where seven human subjects teleoperated a simulated robot with the HMI to perform dynamic target tracking tasks. The experimental results suggest that all subjects accomplished the tasks with both mappings after practice, and the force feedback improved their performances. However, the subjects exhibited two distinct teleoperation styles, which benefited from the force feedback differently. Moreover, the force feedback affected the subjects' preferences on the teleoperation mappings, though most subjects performed better with the velocity mapping.

Sunyu Wang, Kevin Murphy, Dillan Kenney et al.

Teleoperation (i.e., controlling a robot with human motion) proves promising in enabling a humanoid robot to move as dynamically as a human. But how to map human motion to a humanoid robot matters because a human and a humanoid robot rarely have identical topologies and dimensions. This work presents an experimental study that utilizes reaction tests to compare the proposed joint space mapping and the proposed task space mapping for dynamic teleoperation of an anthropomorphic robotic arm that possesses human-level dynamic motion capabilities. The experimental results suggest that the robot achieved similar and, in some cases, human-level dynamic performances with both mappings for the six participating human subjects. All subjects became proficient at teleoperating the robot with both mappings after practice, despite that the subjects and the robot differed in size and link length ratio and that the teleoperation required the subjects to move unintuitively. Yet, most subjects developed their teleoperation proficiencies more quickly with the task space mapping than with the joint space mapping after similar amounts of practice. This study also indicates the potential values of a three-dimensional task space mapping, a teleoperation training simulator, and force feedback to the human pilot for intuitive and dynamic teleoperation of a humanoid robot's arms.