Elements of Telerobotics Necessary for Waste Clean Up Automation

A promising way to achieve increased remote worksystem efficiency is to layer telerobotic technologies onto teleoperated remote systems. The research being reported here will enable the teleoperation baseline to be supplemented with operator-selective telerobotic modes of operation that allow automatic performance of subtasks that are either repetitive, require high precision, or involve extreme patience. Before subtask automation can be exploited, however, it is necessary to explicitly represent the 3-D geometry of the task space scene surrounding the remote worksystem. The Robot Task Space Analyzer (RSTA) is a tool for remote equipment operators that combines infrared laser and visible stereo imaging, human-interactive modeling and computer-based object recognition to build 3-D models of the immediate work zone in which a robot system is operating. This paper presents the hardware and software design of the RTSA system. Human factors aspects the system operation and design are discussed.