Development of a teleoperation system for mobile manipulators utilizing semantic information of the environment and semi-autonomous support behavior

Abstract

In recent aging society, mobile manipulators are expected to replace and support human labor in indoor environments. However, they require human teleoperation in real operation at this point. In this paper, we develop a new teleoperation interface for mobile manipulators replacing previous interfaces. In previous work, teleoperators are forced to operate grasping task in limited or difficult-to-indetify visual feedbacks. In this work, however, a proposed recoginition system assuming world models enables teleoperators to get semantic and spatial information of objects around mobile manipulators. Moreover, we develop another feature which assist grasping objects selected by teleoperators. The experimental results showed that the time of teleoperation was reduced compared to the baseline method, suggesting the possibility of improving the operability of teleoperation.