  Remote teleoperation of robots can broaden the reach of domain specialists
across a wide range of industries such as home maintenance, health care, light
manufacturing, and construction. However, current direct control methods are
impractical, and existing tools for programming robot remotely have focused on
users with significant robotic experience. Extending robot remote programming
to end users, i.e., users who are experts in a domain but novices in robotics,
requires tools that balance the rich features necessary for complex
teleoperation tasks with ease of use. The primary challenge to usability is
that novice users are unable to specify complete and robust task plans to allow
a robot to perform duties autonomously, particularly in highly variable
environments. Our solution is to allow operators to specify shorter sequences
of high-level commands, which we call task-level authoring, to create periods
of variable robot autonomy. This approach allows inexperienced users to create
robot behaviors in uncertain environments by interleaving exploration,
specification of behaviors, and execution as separate steps. End users are able
to break down the specification of tasks and adapt to the current needs of the
interaction and environments, combining the reactivity of direct control to
asynchronous operation. In this paper, we describe a prototype system
contextualized in light manufacturing and its empirical validation in a user
study where 18 participants with some programming experience were able to
perform a variety of complex telemanipulation tasks with little training. Our
results show that our approach allowed users to create flexible periods of
autonomy and solve rich manipulation tasks. Furthermore, participants
significantly preferred our system over comparative more direct interfaces,
demonstrating the potential of our approach.
