Mr Ioannis-Marios Stavropoulos

BSc (Hons)

Research

I am currently a Teaching Associate and PhD candidate researching robot shared autonomy via immersive interfaces under communications delays and bandwidth constraints.

I am developing a supervisory control-based robot teleoperation system for remote manipulation in space. The standard approach of direct teleoperation of the robot with shared control approaches (i.e. adjustment and correction of continuous user input to some extent) is unsuitable in scenarios where the communication medium between the local (operator's) and remote (robot's) environments is challenged by long delays and limited communication windows or bandwidth. My system's architecture involves immersing the operator in Augmented Reality where the operator is able to see a visualization of the robot's environment, monitor/supervise task execution by setting high-level goals to the robot, and correcting any errors reported back from the robot during execution.

There is an on-going collaboration with the SpaceR Space Robotics Research Group at the University of Luxembourg to test my system in a space robotics use case, where the robot has to assemble a modular solar panel structure in space. The proof of concept was presented at the iSpaRo (International Conference on Space Robotics) in Luxembourg in June 2024. The system has the potential to be generalized such that it can be used in nuclear and underwater robotics scenarios.

My graduation project was on "Robot Navigation Commands via Augmented Reality Interfaces" (for more information and other projects, visit my website).