An Autonomous Spherical Robot for Security Tasks

The use of remotely operated robotic systems in security related applications is becoming increasingly popular However, the direct teleoperation interfaces commonly used today put a large amount of cognitive burden on the operators, thus seriously reducing the efficiency and reliability of these systems. We present an approach to alleviate this problem by exploiting both software and hardware autonomy. At the software level, we propose a variable autonomy control architecture that dynamically adapts the degree of autonomy of the robot in terms of control, perception, and interaction. At the hardware level, we rely on the intrinsic autonomy and robustness provided by the spherical morphology of our Ground-Bot robot. We also present a prototype system for facilitating the interaction between human operators and robots using our control architecture. This work is specifically aimed at increasing the effectiveness of the GroundBot robot for remote inspection tasks