Abstract
Worker safety is one of the most important aspects of decontamination tasks in hazardous environments. This motivates the development of (semi-) autonomous robotic systems that can be teleoperated from a safe distance using simple commands such as ‘move the manipulator over there and grab’. In this paper, we introduce a new control station concept called Digital Twin Control System aimed at robots with manipulator arms. It consists of three components: (1) A unified communication interface that abstracts the remote robot’s functionalities into easy-to-use interaction modes, (2) an immersive visualization and assistant system to operate the interface, and (3) a haptic rendering system that can simulate arbitrary robot arms. We demonstrate how the proposed system can be used by untrained operators to pick up contaminated objects remotely in a test scenario.
Zusammenfassung
Bei Dekontaminationsaufgaben ist der Schutz der Arbeiter in gefährlichen Umgebungen von zentraler Bedeutung. Dies motiviert die Entwicklung von (semi-)autonomen Robotersystemen, die sich aus sicherer Entfernung mit einfachen Befehlen wie ,,bewege den Manipulator nach dort und greife“ teleoperieren lassen. Diese Arbeit stellt ein neues Leitstandkonzept für Roboter mit Manipulatorarmen im Sinne eines ,,Digital Twin Control System“ vor. Es besteht aus drei Komponenten: (1) einer einheitlichen Kommunikationsschnittstelle, welche die gesamte Funktionalität des Roboters mit einfach zu bedienenden Interaktionsmoden abstrahiert, (2) einem immersiven Assistenz- und Visualisierungssystem, um die Schnittstelle zu bedienen, und (3) einem haptischen Renderingsystem, das beliebige Roboterarme simulieren kann. Ein Testszenario zeigt, wie ein Operator kontaminierte Objekte ohne Vorabtraining aus der Ferne vom Boden aufheben kann.
About the authors
Michael Fennel is a researcher and PhD student at the Intelligent Sensor-Actuator-Systems Laboratory of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. His research interests include robotics, autonomous systems, haptic systems, and human machine interaction.
Dr.-Ing. Antonio Zea is a researcher at the Intelligent Sensor-Actuator-Systems Laboratory of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. His research interests include robot teleoperation with VR/AR and human machine interaction.
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Uwe D. Hanebeck is a chaired professor of Computer Science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and director of the Intelligent Sensor-Actuator-Systems Laboratory. His research interests include information fusion, nonlinear state estimation, and stochastic modeling.
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Author contributions: All authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this submitted manuscript and approved submission.
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Research funding: This work was supported by the ROBDEKON project (grant No. 13N14675) of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
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Conflict of interest statement: The authors declare no conflicts of interest regarding this article.
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