Shared Control in Robot Teleoperation with Improved Potential Fields

Reference paper: A. Gottardi, S.Tortora*, E.Tosello*, E. Menegatti. Shared Control in Robot Teleoperation with Improved Potential Fields. IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems (THMS). Special Issue on Human Interaction with Artificial Intelligence Systems: New Human-Centered Perspectives and Challenges (2022).

Abstract: In shared control teleoperation, the robot assists the user in accomplishing the desired task. Rather than simply executing the user's command, the robot attempts to integrate it with information from the environment, such as obstacle and/or goal locations, and it modifies its behavior accordingly. In this work, we propose a real-time shared control teleoperation framework based on an Artificial Potential Fields approach improved by the dynamic generation of escape points around the obstacles. These escape points are virtual attractive points in the potential field that the robot can follow to overcome the obstacles more easily. The selection of which escape point to follow is done in real-time by solving a soft-constrained problem optimizing the reaching of the most probable goal, estimated from the user's action. Our proposal has been extensively compared with two state-of-art approaches in a static cluttered environment and a dynamic setup with randomly moving objects. Experimental results showed the efficacy of our method in terms of quantitative and qualitative metrics. For example, it significantly decreases the time to complete the tasks and the user's intervention, and it helps reduce the failure rate. Moreover, we received positive feedback from the users that tested our proposal. Finally, the proposed framework is compatible with both mobile and manipulator robots.