Variable Autonomy of Whole-body Control for Inspection and Intervention in Industrial Environments using Legged Robots
This work addresses the problem of protecting human operators from hazards in industrial settings by enhancing teleoperation capabilities for legged robots, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing loco-manipulation algorithms.
The authors tackled the challenge of enabling safe and effective remote operation of legged robots in industrial environments by proposing a variable autonomy control framework with three operation modes, validated through field trials including emergency stops and terrain traversal.
The deployment of robots in industrial and civil scenarios is a viable solution to protect operators from danger and hazards. Shared autonomy is paramount to enable remote control of complex systems such as legged robots, allowing the operator to focus on the essential tasks instead of overly detailed execution. To realize this, we propose a comprehensive control framework for inspection and intervention using a legged robot and validate the integration of multiple loco-manipulation algorithms optimised for improving the remote operation. The proposed control offers 3 operation modes: fully automated, semi-autonomous, and the haptic interface receiving onsite physical interaction for assisting teleoperation. Our contribution is the design of a QP-based semi-analytical whole-body control, which is the key to the various task completion subject to internal and external constraints. We demonstrate the versatility of the whole-body control in terms of decoupling tasks, singularity tolerance and constraint satisfaction. We deploy our solution in field trials and evaluate in an emergency setting by an E-stop while the robot is clearing road barriers and traversing difficult terrains.