A Study of Shared-Control with Bilateral Feedback for Obstacle Avoidance in Whole-Body Telelocomotion of a Wheeled Humanoid

Teleoperation has emerged as an alternative solution to fully-autonomous systems for achieving human-level capabilities on humanoids. Specifically, teleoperation with whole-body control is a promising hands-free strategy to command humanoids but requires more physical and mental demand. To mitigate this limita- tion, researchers have proposed shared-control methods incorpo- rating robot decision-making to aid humans on low-level tasks, fur- ther reducing operation effort. However, shared-control methods for wheeled humanoid telelocomotion on a whole-body level has yet to be explored. In this work, we explore how whole-body bilateral feedback with haptics affects the performance of different shared- control methods for obstacle avoidance in diverse environments. A time-derivative Sigmoid function (TDSF) is implemented to gener- ate more intuitive haptic feedback from obstacles. Comprehensive human experiments were conducted and the results concluded that bilateral feedback enhances the whole-body telelocomotion performance in unfamiliar environments but could reduce perfor- mance in familiar environments. Conveying the robot’s intention through haptics showed further improvements since the operator can utilize the feedback for reactive short-distance planning and visual feedback for long-distance planning.