Seamless Mode Switching for Shared Control of Semiautonomous Vehicles

Whether it be a crew station, the Shuttle Remote Manipulator System (SRMS), an unmanned ground rover (UGV) or air vehicle (UAV), or teams thereof, the controllers for such systems will be complex, multilevel, usually distributed, systems. When a human user desires to switch between automatic and manual control, the transition must occur at all levels of the controller. There exist no well-developed strategies for managing such transitions and no proven methods for guaranteeing overall stability in the classical control-theoretic sense, or even safety and reliability in the general sense. These type of issues will span virtually every shared-control application in future NASA exploration systems. Intelligent Automation, Inc. proposes to use a two-level, distributed robot controller with multimodal user interface (UI) and demonstrate a technique to seamlessly transition between teleoperation and autonomous operation. The technique is based on using Hidden Markov Models to identify the current active state at each level of the controller. The demonstration platform was developed for a previous NASA project for JSC to develop automatic programming methods for astronaut assistants.