Auctus Team Presents Antun’s Work on Polytopes at Humanoids 2024

The Auctus team showcased the work of Antun Skuric on polytopes at the Humanoids 2024 conference. The event, held in Nancy, gathered experts in humanoid robotics and the general public.

Antun’s polytopes (Pycapacity) were used to demonstrate a robot’s capabilities in terms of forces, velocities, and reachable space over a horizon. The proposed demonstration fueled interesting discussions both with robotics scientists and the general public regarding the importance of human and robot capability evaluation for the proper design and control of assistive robots. Leveraging Claire Houziel’s work on the Microsoft Hololens headset, the polytopes were displayed on the robot using Augmented Reality. This demonstration sparked many interesting discussions with the audience and served as an excellent tool for robotics mediation.

As part of the SHAARE associate team, between Auctus (Inria) and the IRiS lab (Kaist), PhD student Alexis Boulay visited KAIST University between September and November. The visit led to discussions on collaborating on the adaptation of haptic guidance geometry based on teleoperation context.

The Auctus team performed a demonstration during an exhibition day at Place Pey Berland, in front of Bordeaux’s Town Hall. This demonstration aimed to explain robot teleoperation to the general public. In this experiment, participants had to move a vial inside a maze using a teleoperating device. Two types of haptic guidance were provided for this task: one without any guidance, and one using the guiding tubes tested by Alexis Boulay in his recent experiments

Paper Abstract

In hazardous or inaccessible environments, teleoperation enables remote task execution. However, its effectiveness is hindered by reduced performance and an increased operator workload, primarily due to the lack of direct sensory feedback. To address this issue, haptic guidance, that provides a guiding force feedback through the haptic device, can enhance remote operations by directing the operator towards task goals. This method relies on both the environment and the operator, and its effectiveness is affected by their dynamics. Consequently, developing an adaptive guidance that responds to changing situations is essential for practical use.

Teleoperation is a method often used to carry out tasks in dangerous, inaccessible or sensitive environments where human’s expertise and ability to adapt cannot be replaced by an autonomous robot. However, teleoperation also involves a split between the operator and the workspace. To counter this, haptic interfaces are used, transmitting the physical interactions of the robot with its environment via force feedback. The facility to generate forces, on the operator side, can also be exploited to help perform a task by the use of guiding forces.