A Taxonomy for Heavy-Duty Telemanipulation Tasks Using Elemental Actions

Abstract

In the maintenance of large scientific facilities, telemanipulation procedures can involve various subprocedures which in turn are made up of a sequence of subtasks. This work presents a taxonomy which describes a set of elemental actions for heavy-duty telemanipulation, along with an example of these actions in a standard maintenance subprocedure. As maintenance tasks are often very different at high-level, this generalized way of deconstructing tasks allows a highly adaptable approach to describe the sequence of any procedure, which can then be used for such applications as task monitoring, automation or detection of incomplete tasks. We describe in detail the properties of each elemental action and apply the taxonomy to an example subprocedure to show how the process can be generalizable. An automatic state-machine creation stage is shown, which would be used at the task scheduling stage to simplify calculations carried out during the moment-by-moment execution of the task.

A task analysis approach to quantify bottlenecks in task completion time of telemanipulated maintenance

“…For robot planning, these tasks have been subdivided into more general manipulation primitives or elemental actions; e.g. move, approach, transport, place, push, slide, grasp, release [22], [23]. A second way to describe tasks is from the human controller point of view.…”

A framework for fine robotic assembly

“…We present a motion-centric taxonomy that classifies manipulation primitives required for assembly tasks. Typically, two different approaches have been used in previous taxonomies: object- [6], [7] or motion-centric [8], [9]. Objectcentric classifications define the primitives focusing on the characteristics of the manipulated object, which complicates their extension to different type of systems.…”

“…Similarly to [8] and [9], a motion-centric approach has been adopted for the taxonomy proposed in this work. It allows for greater flexibility than an object-centric approach, which would restrict the manipulation to the a priori knowledge of the object.…”

“…As our taxonomy is tailored for industrial fine assembly, it differs from existing manipulation taxonomies [6], [7], [8], [9] in two key aspects: (i) we focus on parallel-jaw grippers (the most common and robust gripper in the industry), which excludes some complex primitives such as in-hand manipulation; (ii) in addition to the interaction of the gripper with the gripped object, we also consider multi-object interactions (e.g. the gripped object interacts with another object), which constitute the essence of assembly.…”