Reducing the Teleoperator’s Cognitive Burden for Complex Contact Tasks Using Affordance Primitives

Using robotic manipulators to remotely perform real-world complex contact tasks is challenging whether tasks are known (due to uncertainty) or unknown a priori (lack of motion waypoints, force profiles, etc.). For known tasks we can integrate and utilize Affordance Templates with a selective compliance jogger to remotely perform high dimensional velocity/force tasks - such as turning valves, opening doors, etc. Affordance Templates (ATs) contain virtual visual representations of task-relevant objects and waypoints for interacting with visualized objects. Operators and/or developers align pre-defined ATs with real-world objects to complete complex tasks, potentially reducing the operator’s input dimension to a single initiation command. In this work, we integrate a compliant controller with existing ATs to reduce the operator’s burden by 1) reducing the dimension of commanded inputs, 2) internally managing contact forces even for complex tasks, and 3) providing situational awareness in the task frame. Since not all tasks can be modeled for general teleoperation, we also introduce Affordance Primitives which reduce the command dimensionality of complex spatial tasks to as low as 1-dimensional input gestures as demonstrated for this effort. To enable reduction of the command input’s dimension, the same compliant jogger used to robustly handle uncertainty with ATs is used with Affordance Primitives to autonomously maintain force constraints associated with complex contact tasks. Both Affordance Templates and Affordance Primitives - when used in tandem with a compliant jogger - provide a safe, intuitive, and efficient teleoperation system for general use including using primitives to easily develop new Affordance Templates from newly completed teleoperation tasks.