SBIR Phase I: Collaborative Subsea Manipulation Interface

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project includes technological advancement for a wide range of telerobotic applications including and manipulation tasks in hazardous or remote environments, search and rescue, remotely operated construction and maintenance, mining, bomb disposal, munitions remediation. This project will result in new understanding into how spatial awareness and telepresence can improve performance in human-in-the-loop teleoperation. Improving the communication of intent between the expert of the remote task and the expert of operating the telerobotic equipment will benefit industries where non-intuitive tasks are to be executed in a safe and efficient fashion. Modern demands are pushing current systems beyond their limits. Development of the tools of this project will make a wide range of telerobotic tasks achievable with greater efficiency, safety and cost effectiveness. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project develops a collaborative interface for subsea manipulation tasks. Current methods for teleoperation in unstructured and dynamic environments are inadequate for collaborative tasks where precision is required. This is often the case in subsea infrastructure development, maintenance, and repair. Highly skilled operators are called on to execute complex manipulation tasks that require high spatial accuracy and time-efficiency. As demand for this work increases, the tolerance of both customers and regulators for mistakes that result in polluting damage is, in fact, decreasing. The major innovation in this work is the combination of the skill and experience of the operator with the accuracy and repeatability of an automated robotic system. This is achieved by augmenting the telerobotic control architecture with real-time force feedback to the operator?s hands, to guide the operator in robot tasks. Phase I will demonstrate feasibility for an advanced telerobotic system allowing pilots and supervisors to collaboratively execute a complex subsea manipulation task. This includes validation of operator/supervisor collaboration using head-mounted display and fusion of multiple sensor types. Phase II will demonstrate that the method improves operational performance in an actual subsea setting.