EXTARIA: Extensible Teleoperation Architecture Optimized for Robotic Industrial Applications

Conventional robotic automation approaches struggle to meet the growing demand for flexibility in managing increasingly complex processes that require rapid reconfiguration, cost reduction, and safe human-robot collaboration. Teleoperation offers a solution to these limitations, but its industrial application is hindered by factors such as the limited availability of motion primitives and low-level access provided by standard robot controllers. Teleoperation can support essential automation tasks, including more ergonomic and improved human execution and recording expert demonstrations to learn task trajectories that are difficult to implement with standard motion primitives. This work explores the use of teleoperation for complex and high-precision industrial processes. It proposes an extensible teleoperation architecture called EXTARIA, featuring movement scaling, indexing, and support for virtual fixtures. EXTARIA is designed to respect industrial constraints and implements various movement mapping schemes using control methods directly supported by the industrial robot controller, such as position and velocity control. The architecture is demonstrated using a Mecademic Meca500 manipulator and a 3DSystems Touch haptic device. EXTARIA is experimentally evaluated in realistic scenarios to assess its performance and suitability for real industrial applications, considering relevant task performance metrics.