Robot, do what I do

New teleoperation system promises big improvements in humanoid robotics.

Improvements in artificial intelligence continue apace, but the development of humanoid robots capable of matching human-level movement and dexterity in real situations has been a challenge.

A study published in the journal

Science Robotics, suggests we’re now a few steps closer.

Us-based engineers Joao Ramos, from the University of Illinois, and Sangbae Kim, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have created a new teleoperation (remote control) system that more seamlessly transfers the movement of a human operator to a two-legged robot.

Many existing approaches capture human data and manipulate it with computers in an attempt to match a robot’s limitations. However, this is time consuming and doesn’t provide any physical feedback on what the robot is doing.

Ramos and Kim tackled these challenges by dynamically synchronising a human operator’s motion to that of a small bipedal test robot named Little HERMES.

To better scale human motion to the robot, they used a simplified model for two-legged dynamics called linear inverted pendulum (LIP). With this model, the control system generated feedback forces to the operator proportional to the relative speed between human and robot. For example, the system would speed up human motion to match a faster robot or generate drag to match the operator to a slower robot.

Ramos and Kim now hope to improve their system by using more advanced twolegged robots, minimising communication delay between operator and robot, and exploring other ways human intention can be anticipated: through biosignals, for example.

The introduction to their paper dramatically illustrates the worth of this work. “If this technology had been available back in March 2011, the catastrophic outcome of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant nuclear disaster could have been vastly mitigated.

“It is estimated that, if a responder had been able to endure the deadly levels of radiation and enter the facility within the first 24 hours after the cooling system malfunctioned, the first nuclear reactor could have been stabilised.”