COLOR AND 3-DIMENSIONAL VISION-BASED ASSISTIVE TELEMANIPULATION

This paper presents a general purpose assistive tele-robot system that is designed to manipulate objects in a three-dimensional environment by using color and stereo vision. The incorporated vision system allow s the user to operate the robot remotely simply by gesturing (pointing with a laser pointer). In this vision-based tele-manipulation system, the user is in the control loop actively interacting with the reactiv e robot motion planner through a multimodal interface (vision and spee ch). Because of this unique feature, the robot system has been simplif ied and released from performing the complex object recognition tasks that are often required by autonomous systems. (C) 1998 Elsevier Scien ce B.V.