Effective supervision and teleoperation of nursing robots working together with humans in a hospital setting is important so that patients can receive proper care. Studies have been conducted on interfaces that supervise and offer teleoperation of swarms of robots for use in the military and in other commercial fields. These studies offer valuable insight and guidelines on how to design a similar interface for nursing robots. In this paper, we present a method for teleoperation of a multi-robot system using two interfaces. This project hopes to improve upon current teleoperation of multi-robot systems (MRS) by having two different managers control different areas of the workflow. One manager is known as the supervisor and the other manager is known as the operator. The supervisor is responsible for task allocation to the robots. However, robot autonomy is not often capable of performing reliably in uncertain environments. In these cases, the operator can take control of the stalled robot, correct the performance issue, and return the robot to the supervisor where the robot can continue its autonomous operation.

Demo

Students

• Gabriel Entov, Nicholas Lanotte, and Owen Smith, Best project for RBE/CS 526 Human-Robot Interaction Course (2020 Fall)

Publications

• TBA