Biblio

Despite advances regarding autonomous functionality for robots, teleoperation remains a means for performing delicate tasks in safety critical contexts like explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) and ambiguous environments. Immersive stereoscopic displays have been proposed and developed in this regard, but bring about their own specific problems, e.g., simulator sickness. This work builds upon standardized test environments to yield reproducible comparisons between different robotic platforms. The focus was placed on testing three optronic systems of differing degrees of immersion: (1) A laptop display showing multiple monoscopic camera views, (2) an off-the-shelf virtual reality headset coupled with a pantilt-based stereoscopic camera, and (3) a so-called Telepresence Unit, providing fast pan, tilt, yaw rotation, stereoscopic view, and spatial audio. Stereoscopic systems yielded significant faster task completion only for the maneuvering task. As expected, they also induced Simulator Sickness among other results. However, the amount of Simulator Sickness varied between both stereoscopic systems. Collected data suggests that a higher degree of immersion combined with careful system design can reduce the to-be-expected increase of Simulator Sickness compared to the monoscopic camera baseline while making the interface subjectively more effective for certain tasks.

The paper presents a comprehensive model of cybersecurity threats for a system of autonomous and remotely controlled vehicles (AV) in the environment of a smart city. The main focus in the security context is given to the “integrity” property. That property is of higher importance for industrial control systems in comparison with other security properties (availability and confidentiality). The security graph, which is part of the model, is dynamic, and, in real cases, its analysis may require significant computing resources for AV systems with a large number of assets and connections. The simplified example of the security graph for the AV system is presented.

This paper explores an innovative approach to the telerobotics reasoning architecture and networking, which offer a reliable and adaptable operational process for complex tasks. There are many operational challenges in the remote control for manufacturing that can be introduced by the network communications and Iatency. A new protocol, named compact Reliable UDP (compact-RUDP), has been developed to combine both data channelling and media streaming for robot teleoperation. The original approach ensures connection reliability by implementing a TCP-like sliding window with UDP packets. The protocol provides multiple features including data security, link status monitoring, bandwidth control, asynchronous file transfer and prioritizing transfer of data packets. Experiments were conducted on a 5DOF robotic arm where a cutting tool was mounted at its distal end. A light sensor was used to guide the robot movements, and a camera device to provide a video stream of the operation. The data communication reliability is evaluated using Round-Trip Time (RTT), and advanced robot path planning for distributed decision making between endpoints. The results show 88% correlation between the remotely and locally operated robots. The file transfers and video streaming were performed with no data loss or corruption on the control commands and data feedback packets.

In this paper, the design as well as complete implementation of a robot which can be autonomously controlled for surveillance. It can be seamlessly integrated into an existing security system already present. The robot's inherent ability allows it to map the interiors of an unexplored building and steer autonomously using its self-ruling and pilot feature. It uses a 2D LIDAR to map its environment in real-time and HD camera records suspicious activity. It also features an in-built display with touch based commands and voice recognition that enables people to interact with the robot during any situation.

There are many challenges when it comes to deploying robots remotely including lack of operator situation awareness and decreased trust. Here, we present a conversational agent embodied in a Furhat robot that can help with the deployment of such remote robots by facilitating teaming with varying levels of operator control.

In this paper, we study the model of human trust where an operator controls a robotic swarm remotely for a search mission. Existing trust models in human-in-the-loop systems are based on task performance of robots. However, we find that humans tend to make their decisions based on physical characteristics of the swarm rather than its performance since task performance of swarms is not clearly perceivable by humans. We formulate trust as a Markov decision process whose state space includes physical parameters of the swarm. We employ an inverse reinforcement learning algorithm to learn behaviors of the operator from a single demonstration. The learned behaviors are used to predict the trust level of the operator based on the features of the swarm.

A number of blind Image Quality Evaluation Metrics (IQEMs) for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) photograph application are presented. Nowadays, the visible light camera is widely used for UAV photograph application because of its vivid imaging effect; however, the outdoor environment light will produce great negative influences on its imaging output unfortunately. In this paper, to conquer this problem above, we design and reuse a series of blind IQEMs to analyze the imaging quality of UAV application. The Human Visual System (HVS) based IQEMs, including the image brightness level, the image contrast level, the image noise level, the image edge blur level, the image texture intensity level, the image jitter level, and the image flicker level, are all considered in our application. Once these IQEMs are calculated, they can be utilized to provide a computational reference for the following image processing application, such as image understanding and recognition. Some preliminary experiments for image enhancement have proved the correctness and validity of our proposed technique.