| Telerobotic techniques combine robotic devices with remote control technology to enable the performance of tasks which may be hazardous or impossible for humans to perform directly. In contrast, autonomous systems are intended to operate without human intervention in unstructured environments; they tend to be brittle and have limited functionality at present. Teleautonomous systems attempt to combine the advantages of telerobotics and autonomous systems.; Numerous generalized architectures for telerobotic systems have been proposed. Most are hard-wired instantiations of a specific approach, which rarely address the interactions between human and autonomous elements of teleautonomous systems. The work described here provides a more general, easily extensible and modifiable architecture. Specific issues addressed include methods that fuse decisions from multiple sources (such as human, reactive, or deliberative), integrate multiple command sources, and accommodate multi-purpose event recognizers to change operating modes. These methods may be dynamically altered to generate a variety of control modes. A result of the research described in this thesis is a modifiable, extensible framework for the unification of the many modes of control, such as shared, teleoperative, and supervisory, which are described in the telerobotics literature. |
