From Teleoperation To Autonomy Overview

From Teleoperation To Autonomy Overview

On the role of artificial intelligence for robots. At

first, that may appear redundant; aren’t robots intelligent? The short answer

is “no,” most robots currently in industry are not intelligent by any

definition. This chapter attempts to distinguish an intelligent robot from a

non-intelligent robot.

The chapter begins with an overview of artificial intelligence and the social

implications of robotics. This is followed with a brief historical perspective

on the evolution of robots towards intelligence, as shown in Fig. 1.1. One

way of viewing robots is that early on in the 1960’s there was a fork in the

evolutionary path. Robots for manufacturing took a fork that has focused on

engineering robot arms formanufacturing applications. The key to success in

industry was precision and repeatability on the assembly line for mass production,

in effect, industrial engineers wanted to automate the workplace.

Once a robot arm was programmed, it should be able to operate for weeks

and months with only minor maintenance. As a result, the emphasis was

placed on the mechanical aspects of the robot to ensure precision and repeatability

and methods to make sure the robot could move precisely and

repeatable, quickly enough to make a profit. Because assembly lines were

engineered to mass produce a certain product, the robot didn’t have to be

able to notice any problems. The standards for mass production would make

it more economical to devise mechanisms that would ensure parts would be

in the correct place. A robot for automation could essentially be blind and

senseless.

Robotics for the space programtook a different fork, concentrating instead

on highly specialized, one-of-a-kind planetary rovers. Unlike a highly automated

manufacturing plant, a planetary rover operating on the dark side of

the moon (no radio communication) might run into unexpected situations.

Consider that on Apollo 17, astronaut and geologist Harrison Schmitt found

an orange rock on the moon; an orange rock was totally unexpected. Ideally,

a robot would be able to notice something unusual, stop what it was doing

(as long as it didn’t endanger itself) and investigate. Since it couldn’t be preprogrammed

to handle all possible contingencies, it had to be able to notice

its environment and handle any problems that might occur. At a minimum,

a planetary rover had to have some source of sensory inputs, some way of

interpreting those inputs, and a way of modifying its actions to respond to

a changing world. And the need to sense and adapt to a partially unknown

environment is the need for intelligence.

The fork toward AI robots has not reached a termination point of truly autonomous,

intelligent robots. In fact, as will be seen in Ch. 2 and 4, it wasn’t

until the late 1980’s that any visible progress toward that end was made. So

what happened when someone had an application for a robot which needed

real-time adaptability before 1990? In general, the lack of machine intelligence

was compensated by the development of mechanisms which allow a

human to control all, or parts, of the robot remotely. These mechanisms are

generally referred to under the umbrella term: teleoperation. Teleoperation

can be viewed as the “stuff” in the middle of the two forks. In practice, intelligent

robots such as the Mars Sojourner are controlled with some form of

teleoperation. This chapterwill cover the flavors of teleoperation, given their

importance as a stepping stone towards truly intelligent robots.

The chapter concludes by visiting the issues in AI, and argues thatAI is imperative

for many robotic applications. Teleoperation is simply not sufficient

or desirable as a long term solution. However, it has served as a reasonable

patch.

It is interesting to note that the two forks, manufacturing and AI, currently

appear to be merging. Manufacturing is now shifting to a “mass customization”

phase, where companies which can economically make short runs of

special order goods are thriving. The pressure is on for industrial robots,

more correctly referred to as industrial manipulators, to be rapidly reprogrammed

and more forgiving if a part isn’t placed exactly as expected in its

workspace. As a result, AI techniques are migrating to industrial manipulators.