Goal-Based Teleoperation for Robot Manipulation

As robot algorithms for manipulation and navigation advance and robot hardware is becoming more robust and readily available, industry demands robots to perform more sophisticated tasks in our homes and factories. For many years, direct teleoperation was the most common and traditional form of control for robots. However, due to the complexity of robot motion, human operators must focus most of their attention on solving low-level motion control which leads to their heightened cognitive load. In this abstract, we propose a goal-directed approach to programming robots by providing a tool to model the world and provide goal states for a given task. Operators will be able to set the initial positions of objects and their affordances along with their goal positions by imposing three dimensional (3D) templates on point clouds. Robots will solve the given task using the combination of task and motion planning algorithms.