Collaborative Teleoperation via the Internet Ken Goldberg, Billy Chen, Rory Solomon, Bob Farzin, Derek Poon, Jacob Heitler, Steve Bui UC Berkeley

Jason: an underwater robot

Collaborative Robot Control: Camera Light Jason 

Related Work R Goertz and R. Thompson, H. Linstone and M. Turoff A. K. Bejczy R. D. Ballard, T. Sheridan R. and L. Carpenter O. Khatib, et al K. Goldberg, et al E Paulos and J. Canny B. Dalton and K. Taylor Y. Akatsuka, S. Goldberg, G, Bekey R. Siegwart

Delphi Method Developed at RAND Corporation in 1960’s 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

Cinematrix Audience Members work collaboratively Everyone holds a red/green “paddle”

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.

Batch Model In the 1994 Mercury project, the users queued up for 5 minute individual control sessions. … User 1 User 2 User n … User 1User 2

Multitask In the 1995 Telegarden project, user motion requests were interleaved – simulating simultaneous control. … User 1 User 2 User n time

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.   n X* = X i ) - µ ((

Collaborative Control aggregates user inputs: In our control model, we aggregate all the user requests into a single request (collaborative control). … User 1 User 2 User n Aggregate

… User 2 User n … User 1 User 2 User n … User 1 … User 2 User n Collaborative Control methods: MultiTask Batch

Application: Ouija board A classic “game” One “planchette” Many players

System Architecture Client Internet Webserver Video Card Robot Control Webserver C CCD CameraRobot Applet VApplet C

Client Interface: Java applet Top Window: video applet Streaming live video of the robot Bottom Window: planchette applet

Planchette Motion Model Realistic motion Inertia Frictional drag

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

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

To test collaborative performance we used a maze.

Views with Noise:

Performance Tests Time to complete maze (sec): 

New users per day: Currently 8000 registered players

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

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