<title>Telerobotic control with stereoscopic augmented reality</title>

Abstract

Teleoperation in unstructured environments is conventionally restricted to direct manual control of the robot. Under such circumstances operator performance can be affected by inadequate visual feedback from the remote site, caused by, for example, limitations in the bandwidth of the communication channel. This paper introduces ARTEMIS (Augmented Reality TEleManipulation Interface System), a new display interface for enabling local teleoperation task simulation. An important feature of the interface is that the display can be generated in the absence of a model of the remote operating site. The display consists of a stereographical model of the robot overlaid on real stereovideo images from the remote site. This stereographical robot is used to simulate manipulation with respect to objects visible in the stereovideo image, following which sequences of robot control instructions can be transmitted to the remote site. In the present system, the update rate of video images can be very low, since continuous feedback is no longer needed for direct manual control of the robot. Several features of the system are presented and its advantages discussed, together with an illustrative example of a pick-and-place task.