Design and implementation of shared autonomy protocols for unmanned ground vehicles

建造自主机器人一直是机器人研究的中心目标。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证，现有的解决方案对于安全关键的情况（例如，在敏感设备或人附近操作）仍然不完全可信。无论是纯手动操作还是完全自主控制，都不能使机器人系统达到令人满意的性能。考虑这样一种情况，即当一个配备有机械臂的移动的机器人被用来读取传感器仪表和操纵石油工厂中的阀门时。在这种情况下，机器人可能需要移动到特定位置，在该特定位置处，仪表在相机中不可见，并且臂可能被手动操纵，因为阀具有不同的形状和/或它们可能处于机器人难以检测到的位置。另一方面，机器人的纯手动远程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来不断地监视机器人在环境中的位置，例如，多个摄像头和点云数据。机器人和操作中心之间的通信质量低（例如，网络的高延迟或可能的丢失）使得在存在高度动态对象的情况下不可能安全地遥控机器人。该项目旨在设计、实现和测试无人驾驶地面车辆（UGV）的控制协议，以实现与人类操作员共享自主权，同时满足安全性能保证。更具体地说，共享自主协议将有助于（1）在没有接收到人类命令时执行安全和最佳的自主控制，（2）过滤或修改由人为错误引起的不安全的人为操作，例如避免与周围物体碰撞，以及（3）最小限度地干预人为操作。

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.