Shared Autonomy Control for Slosh-Free Teleoperation

Shared-autonomy control strategies in teleoperation combine human decision-making and robot precision to solve complex tasks. In other words, advanced autonomous control algorithms can compensate for imprecise human commands, reduce the mental workload of the user, and enable the execution of tasks that otherwise wouldn't be feasible. This paper addresses one of these previously challenging scenarios. Herein, we present a novel control framework and motion generator that allows for real-time non-prehensile slosh-free teleoperation of liquids. The proposed approach is able to generate robust trajectories on the follower side which ensures task-space, joint-space, and manipulability constraint satisfaction. Our findings were evaluated through user studies and real-world scenarios. Participants were even explicitly challenged to try to spill liquid through teleoperation, reaching speeds up to 0.6 m/s.