Collaborative Telerobotics

Ken Goldberg, and Billy Chen
<Initiated: January, 2000>
ALPHA Lab, University of California, Berkeley.
 

Above image depicts possibly the earliest record of collaborative telerobotics.

Introduction

A "telerobot" is a remotely controlled machine equipped with sensors such as cameras and the means to move through and interact with a remote physical environment. NASA's Mars Sojourner is a well-known example. The Sojourner telerobot, like almost all telerobots to date, is controlled by a single human operator. By "collaborative" we mean a system where a number of participants simultaneously share control. We define a "collaborative telerobot" as a telerobot simultaneously controlled by many participants, where input from each participant is combined to generate a single control stream.

Collaborative Telerobotics (CT) is a novel approach to teleimmersion and teleworking. With CT, participants collaborate rather than compete for access to valuable resources such as historical and scientific sites. Collaboration is a crucial ingredient for education and teamwork. A scalable infrastructure for CT, compatible with the Internet, would allow large groups of students or researchers to simultaneously participate in remote experiences. For example, CT can allow groups of disadvantaged students to collaboratively steer a telerobot through a working steelmill in Japan or the Presidential Inauguration, and allow groups of researchers to collaboratively steer a telerobot around a newly active volcano or a fresh archaeological site.

CT raises fundamental new research questions in theory, algorithms, and system implementation. We propose an innovative 3-year ITR/SI research project to establish the science base for a scalable IT infrastructure for CT that will advance human-to-human and human-to-computer remote communication.

Papers

  • Chen, Billy, Ken Goldberg, Judith Donath, "A Formal Model of Collaborative Audience Interfaces," CHI 2001. (submitted) [pdf] [ps]
  • Goldberg, Ken, Billy Chen, Steve Bui, Bobak Farzin, Jacob Heitler, Derek Poon, Rory Solomon, and Gordon Smith, "Collaborative Teleoperation on the Internet", IEEE ICRA 2000, San Francisco, CA. April, 2000. [pdf]
  • The Tele-Actors Guild, "Tele-Direction: A New Framework for Collaborative Telepresence," CHI2001. (submitted)

Projects

  • A Formal Model of Collaborative Audience Interfaces

    In conventional robotics and tele-robotics, one process (human or computer) controls a single robot. We use the term "collaborative control" to describe any system where inputs from many processes are combined to generate control signals for a single resource such as a mobile robot. Experimental evidence with subsumption and behavior suggests that such systems perform surprisingly well and are robust to noise and uncertainty. We propose a formal model to study many-one control. In this model, each process is represented by an agent whose behavior is modeled by a Deterministic Finite Automaton (DFA) with the ability to vote on the motion increment of a global cursor; half the agents control the delta x, the other half delta y, the goal is to make the cursor follow a given circular trajectory. We measure performance of the system by the error between the generated trajectory and the given circular trajectory. We find that our model is surprisingly robust to drop-outs, randomness, time-delay, and even malicious behavior. We develop an analytic model to explain these results. We believe this is the first formal model that confirms experimental results reported with subsumption and other behavior-based architectures. This model can also provide insight into many-one control systems where agents interact over the Internet.

  • Ouija 2000

    The Ouija2000 experience uses the Internet to control an Adept robot arm to which a planchette is attached. Multiple users over the Internet connect to a Java-written server via a Java applet. Streaming video is also distributed via a Java applet. Using an algorithm to aggregate the votes, the server sends the robot a single move - representing every vote cast by each client. The effect is similar to the physical Ouija board.

  • Tele-Actor

    The Tele-Actor is a post-robotic framework for collaborative internet telepresence. The Tele-Actor concept lies at the intersection of internet telepresence and distributed audience control. The audience, a diverse collection of anonymous internet users or Tele-Directors, experiences the remote location through live audio and video hardware attached to a wirelessly networked Tele-Actor. Predefined movements, actions and/or non-actions of the Tele-Actor in the remote location are under the collective control of the entire audience of Tele-Directors. The resulting collaborative commands control a skilled, obedient human Tele-Actor. This new system allows a group of networked individuals to collectively view, experience, and interact within a real remote space, in essence: streaming reality.