From the very beginning of robotics and telerobotics, we have
envisioned using a robot to be our presence at a second location. This
includes seeing what the robot sees, feeling what the robot feels. And
it is still true today – operators sooner or later want to feel the
remote world. Traditional wisdom suggests feeding back sensor
information to the user as directly as possible, making the system as
transparent as possible. Yet this has always left us in a tight bind
between performance and stability. In contrast and to circumvent this
dilemma, we will discuss the use of simple models to communicate
between master and slave and enable force feedback. Encoding
information as such makes the system more robust, more stable, and
perhaps counter-intuitively allows greater presence. The approach also
starts bridging the divide between manual remote control and
supervisory control, which relies entirely on local autonomy. For
perspective we also examine other recent activities at Willow Garage.
- This event has passed.