High-Level Teleoperation System for Aerial Exploration of Indoor Environments

Exploration of challenging indoor environments is a demanding task. While automation with aerial robots seems a promising solution, fully autonomous systems still struggle with high-level cognitive tasks and intuitive decision making. To facilitate automation, we introduce a novel teleoperation syst...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Werner Alexander Isop, Christoph Gebhardt, Tobias Nägeli, Friedrich Fraundorfer, Otmar Hilliges, Dieter Schmalstieg
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2019-10-01
Series:Frontiers in Robotics and AI
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frobt.2019.00095/full
Description
Summary:Exploration of challenging indoor environments is a demanding task. While automation with aerial robots seems a promising solution, fully autonomous systems still struggle with high-level cognitive tasks and intuitive decision making. To facilitate automation, we introduce a novel teleoperation system with an aerial telerobot that is capable of handling all demanding low-level tasks. Motivated by the typical structure of indoor environments, the system creates an interactive scene topology in real-time that reduces scene details and supports affordances. Thus, difficult high-level tasks can be effectively supervised by a human operator. To elaborate on the effectiveness of our system during a real-world exploration mission, we conducted a user study. Despite being limited by real-world constraints, results indicate that our system better supports operators with indoor exploration, compared to a baseline system with traditional joystick control.
ISSN:2296-9144