Collaborative online teleoperation with spatial dynamic voting and a human "Tele-Actor"

Abstract

Internet-based "online robots" now provide public access to remote locations such as museums and laboratories. The Tele-Actor is a collaborative online teleoperation system for distance learning that allows many students to simultaneously share control of a single mobile resource. Our goal is to preserve the educational advantages of field trips without the drawbacks of group travel.We propose the "Spatial Dynamic Voting" (SDV) interface for Multiple Operator Single Robot (MOSR) teleoperation. The SDV collects, displays, and analyzes a sequence of spatial votes from multiple online operators at their Internet browsers. The votes drive the motion of a single mobile robot or human "Tele-Actor". This paper describes Version 3.0 of the system architecture, SDV interface, algorithms for automated goal selection, and metrics for collaboration and leadership. We report results from a July 2001 field test with 56 remote users. See: www.tele-actor.net.

Socially-Driven Collective Path Planning for Robot Missions

“…Their algorithm then computes an optimal targetto-UAV assignment by minimizing the total number of search iterations. Another related work involves a multipleoperator-single-robot setup where the robot is controlled via a spatial voting scheme based on live camera feedback [4]. The authors applied an interval clustering method to fuse waypoints from different humans into a single aggregated robot command.…”

Experiences of using wearable computers for ambient telepresence and remote interaction

“…In [8], Goldberg et al present the "Tele-Actor" which can be either a robot or a wearable computer equipped human person at some remote location, allowing the audience to vote on where it should go and what it should do. A more thorough description of the "Tele-Actor" and the voting mechanism in particular can be found in [7].…”

Algorithms and systems for shared access to a robotic streaming video camera

“…In [4,5] we propose the "Spatial Dynamic Voting" (SDV) interface. The SDV collects, displays, and analyzes sets of spatial votes from multiple online operators using a Gaussian point clustering algorithm developed to guide the motion of a remote human "Tele-Actor".…”