For a broad variety of robotic applications, the critical issues are: proximity to workstation, tethered or radio communications, nature of environment (structured or unstructured), economics, maturity of technology, and teleoperated or autonomous control. The key issue is how to substitute the computer for the human operator. In the long term, different implementations of supervisory control will help simplify this transition. The effectiveness of supervisory control depends on the ability to add incremental autonomy.
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