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Applications of teleoperation have grown along with the advances in computing, networking and robotic technologies. The increased capability and complexity of modern telerobotic systems have benefited the traditional areas of space robotics, nuclear/hazardous material handling, mining, deep-water exploration, as well as more recent applications in medical robotics, micro/macro assembly, maintenance/inspection, and search and rescue. The reader is referred to survey papers (Chen, Haas, & Barnes, 2007; Hokayem & Spong, 2006) and the Advances in Telerobotics textbook (Ferre, Buss, Aracil, Melchiorri, & (Eds.), 2007) for an overview of the applications and research conducted on teleoperation.
In all of the above applications, the role of the operator(s) typically falls under the following scenarios: 1) Complete human teleoperation, 2) Supervision of an autonomous task, 3) Shared or semi-autonomous teleoperation. The ability to accommodate and smoothly transition among these modalities would be indispensable in real-world systems. To be able to operate in complex task environments, teleoperation control architectures have evolved from conventional symmetric single-master/single-slave systems to more advanced multi-operator/multi-robot systems integrated with semi-autonomous control. While many examples of such systems are in the literature, a general framework for their control is still lacking. The current paper fills this gap by proposing a unified strategy for coordination and control of such telerobotic systems, which will be referred to as Asymmetric Semi-autonomous Teleoperation (AST) systems hereinafter.