Bilevel shared control for teleoperators

A shared system is disclosed for robot control including integration of the human and autonomous input modalities for an improved control. Autonomously planned motion trajectories are modified by a teleoperator to track unmodelled target motions, while nominal teleoperator motions are modified through compliance to accommodate geometric errors autonomously in the latter. A hierarchical shared system intelligently shares control over a remote robot between the autonomous and teleoperative portions of an overall control system. Architecture is hierarchical, and consists of two levels. The top level represents the task level, while the bottom, the execution level. In space applications, the performance of pure teleoperation systems depend significantly on the communication time delays between the local and the remote sites. Selection/mixing matrices are provided with entries which reflect how each input's signals modality is weighted. The shared control minimizes the detrimental effects caused by these time delays between earth and space.