Design and implementation of shared autonomy protocols for unmanned ground vehicles

建造自主机器人一直是机器人学研究的中心目标。尽管自主导航系统有了很大的进步，但由于所需任务的复杂性和缺乏安全保障，现有的解决方案在安全关键情况下(例如，在敏感设备或人员附近操作)仍然不受完全信任。无论是纯人工操作还是完全自主控制都不能为机器人系统带来令人满意的性能。考虑一下这样一种情况，即在一家石油工厂里，配备了机器人手臂的移动机器人被用来读取传感器仪表和操纵阀门。在这种情况下，机器人可能被要求移动到摄像机中看不到压力表的特定位置，并且可能需要手动操作手臂，因为阀门的形状不同，或者它们可能处于机器人难以检测到的位置。另一方面，机器人的纯手动遥操作对于操作员来说是麻烦的，因为他们需要使用各种传感器馈送(例如，多个相机馈送和点云数据)来不断地监视机器人在环境中的位置。机器人和操作中心之间的低通信质量(例如，网络的高等待时间或可能的丢弃)使得不可能在存在高动态对象的情况下安全地遥操作机器人。该项目旨在设计、实施和测试无人地面车辆(UGV)的控制协议，以实现与人类操作员共享自主性，同时满足安全性能保证。更具体地说，共享自主协议将帮助(1)在没有接收到人类命令时执行安全和最优的自主控制，(2)过滤或修改由人为错误引起的不安全的人类操作，例如避免与周围对象的碰撞，以及(3)最小限度地干预人类操作。

Building autonomous robots has been a central objective of research in robotics. Despite substantial advancement of autonomous navigation system, existing solutions are still not fully trusted for safety-critical situations (e.g. operating in close proximity of sensitive equipment or humans), due to both the complexity of desired tasks and lack of safety guarantees. Neither purely manual manipulation nor fully autonomous control can lead to satisfactory performance for robotic systems. Consider the situation when a mobile robot equipped with robotics arm is used to read sensor gauges and manipulate valves in a petroleum plant. In this case, the robot might be required to move to a specific location where the gauge is invisible in the camera, and the arm might be manually manipulated since valves come in different shape and or that they might be in positions difficult to detect by the robot. On the other hand, purely manual teleoperation of the robot is cumbersome to the operators as they need to constantly monitor the position of the robot in the environment using various sensor feeds, e.g., multiple camera feeds and pointcloud data. Low communication quality between the robot and the operation center (e.g., the high latency of the network or possible dropouts) makes it impossible to safely teleoperate the robot in the presence of highly dynamic objects. This project aims to design, implement, and test control protocols for unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) to achieve to shared autonomy with human operators while satisfying safe performance guarantees. More specifically, the shared autonomy protocols will help (1) perform safe and optimal autonomous control when receiving no human commands, (2) filter out or modify unsafe human operations that caused by human errors such as avoiding collisions with surrounding objects, and (3) minimally intervene human operations.