An intelligent vision guided telerobotic system for file manipulation and office automation

Describes a vision-guided telerobotic system that enables people with disabilities to perform clerical or office tasks. By adding a light-duty robot to the office workspace, the operator can manipulate files and perform other work-related tasks. To increase the effectiveness of the robot, vision can be used to verify that the robot is correctly positioned. In addition, vision can be be coupled with the telerobotic system to allow the user more intuitive control over the robot. Visual servoing and traditional computed kinematics actions are inappropriate for this application because visual servoing requires an excessive number of iterations and computed kinematics requires accurate calibration. To counteract these difficulties and to provide user functionality, we have designed a hybrid computed-kinematics telerobotic system with an initial coarsely-calibrated computed-kinematics step followed by a more accurate visual-servoing step. We show that there are significant performance benefits from this approach. Finally, we describe how the hybrid system may be utilized in an office environment