  Shared control in teleoperation for providing robot assistance to accomplish
object manipulation, called telemanipulation, is a new promising yet
challenging problem. This has unique challenges--on top of teleoperation
challenges in general--due to difficulties of physical discrepancy between
human hands and robot hands as well as the fine motion constraints to
constitute task success. We present an intuitive shared-control strategy where
the focus is on generating robotic grasp poses which are better suited for
human perception of successful teleoperated object manipulation and feeling of
being in control of the robot, rather than developing objective stable grasp
configurations for task success or following the human motion. The former is
achieved by understanding human intent and autonomously taking over control on
that inference. The latter is achieved by considering human inputs as hard
motion constraints which the robot must abide. An arbitration of these two
enables a trade-off for the subsequent robot motion to balance accomplishing
the inferred task and motion constraints imposed by the operator. The
arbitration framework adapts to the level of physical discrepancy between the
human and different robot structures, enabling the assistance to indicate and
appear to intuitively follow the user. To understand how users perceive good
arbitration in object telemanipulation, we have conducted a user study with a
hands-free telemanipulation setup to analyze the effect of factors including
task predictability, perceived following, and user preference. The hands-free
telemanipulation scene is chosen as the validation platform due to its more
urgent need of intuitive robotics assistance for task success.
