Man-machine interface and supervisor for a mobile robot
Olivier Causse · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1993
The aim of the MITHRA project is the design of an autonomous mobile robot for survey and teleoperating. This project groups several european partners. The role of LIFIA was to design the man machine interface and the navigation control system. The architecture of such system can be described in terms of layers of control, from effectors and sensors level to the symbolic level. At this level there are two modules which communicate with each other: the supervisor and the Man Machine Interface (MMI). This paper describes these two modules. The MMI allows a human operator to describe the robot environment, describe the missions and monitor their execution. For this novice operator, we defined a mission specification language which contains, in a very simple formalism, all the concepts needed for a description of a mission such as time, resources and tactical constraints. The supervisor module plans the mission and during this phase the operator can interact with the supervisor to modify the mission and simulate the execution of the mission. During the execution, the supervisor monitors the constraints and can decide to replan the mission in case of any constraint violation or execution failure. The operator doesn't necessarily step in but he can stop the execution at any time to add or retract a task or teleoperate the robot. Another functionality of the MMI is to replay the executed mission with his historic file. We will discuss the model chosen for the MMI and the role of the supervisor in the dialog between the operator and the remote system. Finally, we will show examples of the working system.