IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2018 - 20

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

(e)

(f)

(g)

(h)

Figure 11. A detail of a manipulation task executed during the field test. (a)-(d) The pilot station is visible, with the operator wearing
the Oculus and Myo bracelets. (e)-(h) The robot WALK-MAN executes the commanded actions.

inspection to speed up the operations. Therefore, a large
number of the buildings to inspect do not present large
quantities of debris on the ground, and wheeled systems can
be effectively used, at least to explore the ground floor. As
future work, we will study the capabilities required to navigate different terrains to define guidelines for using either a
wheeled or legged system.
From a hardware point of view, robustness and reliability
are required to achieve safe interactions with the environment, whereas good perception capabilities are
essential to support pilot
Scene understanding
operations. We proposed
to control the robot
is a difficult task,
through a teleoperation
framework. The aim with
and autonomous methods
this approach is to fill the
gap between the robot
are still far beyond
and the human, unifying
the physical performance
human capabilities.
of the first and the intelligence of the latter. Indeed, scene understanding is a difficult task, and autonomous
methods are still far beyond human capabilities. Navigation
is particularly challenging in scenarios with a high level of
unpredictability, due to the presence of debris and ground
with different characteristics (stiffness, friction, and so
forth). Teleoperation offers the advantage of relying on pilot
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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

september 2018

experience and perception for selecting a safe path inside
the building or for locating stable footholds, which are very
challenging tasks for artificial intelligence. The teleoperation
interface was based on the Oculus Rift and Myo bracelets
teleoperation framework. This resulted in a relatively cheap
teleoperation system, where the cost is approximately €5,400
(Myo × 4 @ €200/unit, Oculus × 1 @ €600, laptop × 2 @
€2,000/unit). The presented teleoperation framework will be
enhanced in the future using force feedback and other
methods to better help the user understand the spatial perception of its avatar, i.e., how far away the surrounding
objects are. Concerning the developed communication system, the final aim of such a system is to have completely
wireless communication between the pilots and the robot to
enhance autonomy. However, to have a good coverage of the
area that the robot has to explore, a dedicated infrastructure
is needed: this can be achieved by means of wireless routers
placed in the environment. Routers can be positioned by
humans in safe locations or by other robots directly inside
the dangerous area. These robots should be lighter and simpler than a humanoid (e.g., rovers and drones) and should
be equipped with one or more Wi-Fi antennas. In the
future, as already discussed, we will consider adopting different communication technologies, such as cellular data
communication protocols. Future work will consider a
usability analysis to assess the ease of use of the teleoperation framework and the use of sensing redundancy and the
implementation of fail-recovery mechanisms to further

IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2018