Engineering Commons^™

Telelocomotion—Remotely Operated Legged Robots, Kevin Huang, Divas Subedi, Rahul Mitra, Isabella Yung, Kirkland Boyd, Edwin Aldrich, Digesh Chitrakar

Faculty Scholarship

© 2020 by the authors. Li-censee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Teleoperated systems enable human control of robotic proxies and are particularly amenable to inaccessible environments unsuitable for autonomy. Examples include emergency response, underwater manipulation, and robot assisted minimally invasive surgery. However, teleoperation architectures have been predominantly employed in manipulation tasks, and are thus only useful when the robot is within reach of the task. This work introduces the idea of extending teleoperation to enable online human remote control of legged robots, or telelocomotion, to traverse challenging terrain. Traversing unpredictable terrain remains a challenge for autonomous legged locomotion, as demonstrated by robots …