Analog Twin Framework for Human and AI Supervisory Control and Teleoperation of Robots

Resource-constrained mobile robots that lack the capability to be completely autonomous can rely on a human or artificial intelligence (AI) supervisor acting at a remote site (e.g., control station or cloud) for their control. Such a supervised autonomy or cloud-based control of a robot poses high networking and computing capabilities requirements at both sites, which are not easy to achieve. This article introduces and analyzes a new analog twin (AT) framework by synchronizing mobility between two mobile robots, where one robot acts as an AT to the other robot. We devise a novel priority-based supervised bilateral teleoperation strategy for goal navigation tasks to validate the proposed framework. The practical implementation of a supervised control strategy on this framework entails a mobile robot system divided into a Master-Client scheme over a communication channel where the Client robot resides on the site of operation guided by the Master robot through an agent (human or AI) from a remote location. The Master robot controls the Client robot with its autonomous navigation algorithm, which reacts to the predictive force received from the Client robot. We analyze the proposed strategy in terms of network performance (throughput and delay), task performance (tracking error and goal reach accuracy), and computing efficiency (memory and CPU utilization). Extensive simulations and real-world experiments demonstrate the method's novelty, flexibility, and versatility in realizing reactive planning applications with remote computational offloading capabilities compared to conventional offloading schemes.