| This thesis presents a bottom-up approach to understanding and extending robotic motor control by integrating human guidance. The focus is on dexterous manipulation using a Utah/MIT robot hand but the ideas apply to other robotic platforms as well.;Teleassistance is a novel method of human/robot interaction in which the human operator uses a gestural sign Language to guide an otherwise autonomous robot through a given task. The operator wears a glove that measures finger joint angles to relay the sign language. Each sign serves to orient the robot within the task action sequence by indicating the next perceptual sub-goal and a relative spatial basis. Teleassistance merges robotic servo loops with human cognition to alleviate the limitations of either full robot autonomy or full human control alone.;The operator's gestures are deictic, from the Greek deiktikos meaning pointing or showing, because they circumscribe the possible interpretations of perceptual feedback to the current context and thereby allow the autonomous routines to perform with computational economy and without dependence on a detailed task model. Conversely, the use of symbolic gestures permits the operator to guide the robot strategically without many of the problems inherent to literal master/slave teleoperation, including non-anthropomorphic mappings, poor feedback, and reliance on a tight communication loop.;The development of teleassistance stems from an analysis of autonomous control, in light of recent advances in manipulator technology. This work also presents a qualitative, context-sensitive control strategy that exploits the many degrees of freedom and compliance of dexterous manipulators. The qualitative strategy governs the underlying autonomous routines in teleassistance. |
