HUNOROB

Goal of HUNOROB

The HUNOROB (Hungarian-Norwegian research based innovation for development of new, environmental friendly, competitive robot technology for selected target groups) project has goals of academic basic research, R&D projects, and product level innovation. Due to its nature the basic research related to the project has general goals. Over the general scientific progress the most important expected achievement of the project is that it aggregates a wide range of academic research and related R&D activities in a few working packages with goals beneficial for the society. The working packages are rather related to R&D activities, and they integrate the knowledge accumulated by scientific research. Their output can be evaluated from the aspect of innovation.

Telemanipulation, as the central concept of the HUNOROB project

Telemanipulation is a process when a user's activity is extended to a dangerous or inaccessible environment without his or her personal presence. The extension is performed by a master-slave system, with the master device representing the distant environment to the user, and the slave device representing the user to the distant environment. In the classical concept, early telemanipulation systems were simply the elongations of human arms, where muscles were later replaced by external energy sources and artificial actuators, but the control remained the task of the human operator, in a point-to-point manner.

The HUNOROB project offers four main novelties in telemanipulation compared to the classical concept.

Cognitive infocommunication - It is our goal to exploit the plasticity of the brain to extend the anatomical human-machine connections to cognitive information links. This can be done by transferring the percepts through different or even new channels. As an example the perception of force can be replace by vibration on the skin, to which the brain can easily adapt.

Intelligent components - It is the goal of ITM to endow the components of the telemanipulation system by intelligence that provides services to help and assist the operator.

Virtual environment - We propose to include virtual 3D Internet in the telemanipulation, which not only allows a wide range of cognitive feedback to the user, but also provides the possibility to define virtual actuators.

Brain in the loop - We are to include the human brain in the robot control loop with the purpose of exploiting its natural intelligence to aid artificial intelligence based solutions. We expect that the mutual interaction of advanced intelligent telemanipulation and the nowadays unimplementable level of human intelligence can be used to apply telemanipulation in a wide range of new applications.