Telerobotic systems adaptive to the quality of its operators

Abstract

Telerobotic systems plays important role in hazardous environment applications. In the past, the design of controllers for telerobotic systems and the performance of the operators have been treated as separated issues. In the controller design, most of researches focus on the stability or transparency of the telerobotic systems. For the aspect of operators, researches have been concentrated on evaluation of the performance of the operators. However, the efficiency and safety of a telerobotic system directly depend on the real-time integration and interactions of the controllers and operators. This paper proposes a concept named Quality of Teleoperator (QoT) to represent the confidence and quality of the decisions and commands generated by a teleoperator. The value of QoT is generated by a set of quantities describing the mental statuses of the teleoperator, which can be measured in real-time based on the operator's electroencephalography (EEG) signals. The controller of the telerobotic system will adjust its parameters based on the QoT in real-time to adapt the confidence and quality of the operator in order to achieve an optimal system performance. Based on QoT, an adaptation scheme for the control system is designed to enhance the efficiency and safety of the telerobotic system. In the paper, the analysis and design methods for QoT based controllers will be discussed. The theoretical analysis and experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed methods.