Multimodal Human-Robot Interface for Supervision and Programming of Cooperative Behaviours of Robotics Agents in Hazardous Environments: Validation in Radioactive and Underwater Scenarios for Objects Transport

Tele-robotic interventions in harsh environments, such as radioactive or disasters as well as underwater scenarios, require well trained operators in order to carry out the operation safely. The complexity of the intervention rapidly increases with the number of robots which take part to the operation. In several situations it is more convenient to leave the control of multiple robots to a single operator than having multiple operators, who could conflict in case of misunderstanding or due to their different tele-operation capabilities. The Human-Robot Interface developed at CERN allows to control a heterogeneous set of robots in an homogeneous way, allowing the operator, among other features, to activate multi-agent collaborative functionalities, which can be programmed and adapted in runtime. The operator is given the capability to enter in the control loop between the HRI and the robot and customize the control commands according to the scenario. Two different types of functionalities are available for the operator: HRI-side functionalities can be programmed in runtime using a script editor integrated in the interface and are executed in an outer control loop between the HRI and the robot; robot-side functionalities (e.g. visual servoing for grasping) can be activated or deactivated but not modified in runtime, and are executed in an inner control loop fully on the robot. The main difference between the two approaches relies on the importance of the functionality in the control loop. In fact, as the HRI is designed to communicate with the robots through unreliable channels, HRI-side scripts should be used only when the specific behaviour is not critical, to enhance safety, even when the connection to the robot might be lost. The HRI has been validated through a unique experiment, performed both in simulation for underwater cooperative applications and in a real ground robot scenario at the LHC mockup. A pool of agents was required for grasping a pipe and transport it. An additional robot was used to provide an external point of view to the operator. The intervention has been planned in advance using the HRI Intervention planning tool.