Telerobotics: merging man with machine

Citation

Pretlove, J. (1999), "Telerobotics: merging man with machine", Industrial Robot, Vol. 26 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ir.1999.04926caa.002

Telerobotics: merging man with machine

Telerobotics: merging man with machine

The author

John Pretlove is a Senior Scientist with the Information Technology and Control Systems Group, at ABB Corporate Research in Norway. He can be contacted by e-mail: john.pretlove@nocrc.abb.no

Keywords Machine, Robots, Telerobotics

The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of ABB Corporate Research.

Hazardous and hostile environments provide robotics engineers with considerable challenges: how do we build systems that can operate in remote environments, carry out tasks safely and achieve all of this in a timely, efficient and economic manner?

The AI community has for a long time proposed using autonomous robot systems. This approach is unrealistic, some would say fundamentally flawed, and alternative more pragmatic approaches with a human operator interacting and co-operating with a computer demonstrate many clear advantages.

Robotics is an appealing technology for hazardous environments because they can remove the operator from the "theatre of operations" and thus reduce the risks to human life. Such hazardous environments include:

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  nuclear decommissioning, inspection, and waste handling;

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  bomb disposal and minefield clearance;

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  deep space, unmanned underwater inspection, and search and rescue;

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  medical applications.

It is clear that the AI approach of employing autonomous robot systems is neither technically realistic in the medium term nor, more importantly, morally or socially acceptable in the longer term. A more pragmatic engineering approach that has been in practice since the 1940s has been to employ telerobotics. These systems consist of sensors and manipulators placed in the hazardous environment connected to displays and controls that the human interacts with. Keeping the human operator in the control loop in such telerobotic devices is actually a significant advantage because it enables them to use their high levels of skill (for example visual perception and judgement) to complement the power of the remote manipulator.

Such systems are not without their own problems. The quality of the system and its ability to achieve the task depends, to a large degree, on the performance of the operator who must be able to perceive and understand the task and must be able to effectively control the manipulator. The performance of the machine is also important in this collaboration: it must provide accurate, stable and yet sensitive control and must do this robustly, even in the presence of external disturbances. Research in recent years has focused on tackling some of these issues to provide telerobotic systems. There is still much research focused on improving the quality of the displays, the control interface and the robot controller to allow for impedance control and predictive modelling.

However there are limitations on how far even this strategy can be taken. In the future greater emphasis will be placed on developing intelligence augmentation (IA) which aims to integrate the strengths of man and machine. In this approach one does not try to replace the human mind with a computer but rather to have the computer and the operator co-operate to achieve what neither could alone. This approach makes considerable sense: humans are good at making judgements, understanding tasks, recognising objects (even in complex and cluttered scenes), reasoning, problem solving and being creative ­ even under considerable pressure, with constraints and missing information! Computers on the other hand are very good at storing and searching vast amounts of data, repeating memorised tasks and multi-tasking. Additionally they are capable of working tirelessly, feel no pain or suffering, and can be easily scaled to the problem. The field of telerobotics stands to benefit greatly from the ability to share and trade control to improve the overall system performance. The challenges that lie ahead call on a multidisciplinary approach to develop the interface between man and machine and will rely on studies of human perception and cognition asmuch as by control and engineering considerations.

Telerobotic engineers have long realised the importance of keeping the human operator in the control loop for hazardous environments. The strengths of judgement, understanding, reasoning and problem solving ensure that man will continue to play a central role in operating future telerobotic systems. In these systems we will see a much tighter integration of man with machine building on each other's strengths.