Tele-autonomous systems: Methods and architectures for intermingling autonomous and telerobotic technology

As a result of recent advances in artificial intelligence, human cognitive modelling, autonomous systems and telerobotics, there is an opportunity to broaden our concepts of technology for projecting action at a distance. We draw on these advances to develop a conceptual and architectural framework that enables efficient projection in time and space of intermingled manipulation and cognition tasks. Where AI-based autonomous systems have previously been concerned with human supervisory intervention primarily at a cognitive level, we add methods for rendezvous, capture and rehandoff of embedded manipulation tasks. Where telerobotics has been concerned with the projection of sensory-motor manipulation, we add the projection of cognitive processing. Thus extended, the two technologies mirror one another and merge into one of "tele-autonomous systems". We introduce notions of how the sensory, cognitive and motor functions of tele-autonomous systems can be factored and transferred back and forth between human and machine. We illustrate how the times to complete tele-autonomous tasks can be reduced through time and space constraint relaxations effected through simple controls: We employ the concepts of forward simulation and predictor display, augmented by "time and position clutches", "time ratio controls" and "time brakes", to control the resulting manipulation paths and event transitions. We sketch some generic architectural and human interface implications of these methods. Finally, we describe our environment for exploring these methods and the results of some recent experiments.