Collaborative Teleoperation via the Internet

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Collaborative Teleoperation via the Internet

• Ken Goldberg, Billy Chen, Rory Solomon, Bob
  Farzin, Derek Poon, Jacob Heitler, Steve Bui
• UC Berkeley

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Jason an underwater robot
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Collaborative Robot Control
Camera
Light
?
Camera
Jason
Camera
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Related Work

• R Goertz and R. Thompson, 1954.
• H. Linstone and M. Turoff. 1975.
• A. K. Bejczy. 1980.
• R. D. Ballard, 1986.
• T. Sheridan. 1992.
• R. and L. Carpenter. 1993.
• O. Khatib, et al. 1996.
• K. Goldberg, et al. 1995.
• E Paulos and J. Canny. 1996.
• B. Dalton and K. Taylor. 1998.
• Y. Akatsuka, S. Goldberg, G, Bekey. 1998.
• R. Siegwart. 1998.

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Delphi Method

• Developed at RAND Corporation in 1960s
• a method of iterated polling
• a group submits votes, views results, discusses
  results and repeats
• experimental results have shown that this method
  converges very closely to the correct result when
  the group is posed with a question

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Cinematrix

• Audience Members work collaboratively
• Everyone holds a red/green paddle

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How can multiple users control one robot?
User 1
User 2
?

User n
The resource (robot) must use a control model
which satisfies each user in a fair way.
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Batch Model
User 1
User 2
User n
User 1
User 2


User n
In the 1994 Mercury project, the users queued up
for 5 minute individual control sessions.
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Multitask
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Central Limit Theorem
Consider n noisy iid inputs Xi. As the number
of inputs increases, the noise in the aggregate
decreases with the square root of n.
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Collaborative Control aggregates user inputs
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Control methods
User 2


Batch
User n
User 1
User 2

User n
MultiTask
User 1
User 2

Collaborative
User n
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Application Ouija board

• A classic game
• One planchette
• Many players

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System Architecture
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Client Interface Java applet

• Top Window video applet
• Streaming live video of the robot
• Bottom Window planchette applet

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Planchette Motion Model

• Realistic motion
• Inertia
• Frictional drag

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Hardware

• Two PC servers one running Win98, one running
  Linux
• Adept 604-S Robot arm
• Panasonic CCD camera

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Challenges

• Serial connetion
• OS Linux vs. Windows
• streaming video server-push vs. Java applet
  Inetcam

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To test collaborative performance we used a maze.
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Views with Noise
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Performance Tests
Time to complete maze (sec)
?

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New users per day
Currently 8000 registered players
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Summary

• Introduction
• Coping with many noisy sensors
• Batch, Multitasking, and Collaborative control
  models
• Implementation
• User Interface and Motion Model
• Experimental Results and Conclusion

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Future Work

• Different control models
• Winner-take-all
• Input weighting based on prior performance
• Different test conditions
• Different time delays
• Different goals

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http//ouija.berkeley.edu