Adjustable autonomy for mobile teleoperation of personal service robots

Controlling personal service robots is an important, complex task which must be accomplished by the users themselves. In this paper, we propose a novel user interface for personal service robots that allows the user to teleoperate the robot using handheld computers. The user can adjust the autonomy of the robot between three levels: body control, skill control, and task control. We design several user interfaces for teleoperation on these levels. On the higher levels, autonomous behavior of the robot relieves the user from significant workload. If the autonomous execution fails, or autonomous functionality is not provided by the robot system, the user can select a lower level of autonomy, e.g., direct body control, to solve a task. In a qualitative user study we evaluate usability aspects of our teleoperation interface with our domestic service robots Cosero and Dynamaid. We demonstrate the benefits of providing adjustable manual and autonomous control.