A visual-based shared control architecture for remote telemanipulation

Cleaning up the past half century of nuclear waste represents the largest environmental remediation project in the whole Europe. Nuclear waste must be sorted, segregated and stored according to its radiation level in order to optimize maintenance costs. The objective of this work is to develop a shared control framework for remote manipulation of objects using visual information. In the presented scenario, the human operator must control a system composed of two robotic arms, one equipped with a gripper and the other one with a camera. In order to facilitate the operator's task, a subset of the gripper motion are assumed to be regulated by an autonomous algorithm exploiting the camera view of the scene. At the same time, the operator has control over the remaining null-space motions w.r.t. the primary (autonomous) task by acting on a force feedback device. A novel force feedback algorithm is also proposed with the aim of informing the user about possible constraints of the robotic system such as, for instance, joint limits. Human/hardware-in-the-loop experiments with simulated slave robots and a real master device are finally reported for demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of the approach.