A mini-review on mobile manipulators with Variable Autonomy

Cesar Alan Contreras; Alireza Rastegarpanah; Manolis Chiou; Rustam Stolkin

doi:10.3389/frobt.2025.1540476

A mini-review on mobile manipulators with Variable Autonomy

Cesar Alan Contreras, Alireza Rastegarpanah, Manolis Chiou, Rustam Stolkin

Research output: Contribution to journal › Review article › peer-review

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Abstract

This paper presents a mini-review of the current state of research in mobile manipulators with variable levels of autonomy, emphasizing their associated challenges and application environments. The need for mobile manipulators in different environments, especially hazardous ones such as decommissioning and search and rescue, is evident due to the unique challenges and risks each presents. Many systems deployed in these environments are not fully autonomous, requiring human-robot teaming to ensure safe and reliable operations under uncertainties. Through this analysis, we identify gaps and challenges in the literature on Variable Autonomy, including cognitive workload and communication delays, and propose future directions, including whole-body Variable Autonomy for mobile manipulators, virtual reality frameworks, and large language models to reduce operators’ complexity and cognitive load in some challenging and uncertain scenarios.

Original language	English
Article number	1540476
Number of pages	8
Journal	Frontiers in Robotics and AI
Volume	12
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2025.1540476
Publication status	Published - 14 Feb 2025

Bibliographical note

Copyright © 2025 Contreras, Rastegarpanah, Chiou and Stolkin. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original
author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in
this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Funding

The author(s) declare that financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was funded by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) and supported by the United Kingdom National Nuclear Laboratory (UKNNL). This work was also supported by the project called “Research and Development of a Highly Automated and Safe Streamlined Process for Increase Lithium-ion Battery Repurposing and Recycling” (REBELION) under Grant 101104241.

Funders	Funder number
Nuclear Decommissioning Authority
United Kingdom National Nuclear Laboratory	101104241

Keywords

human-robot teaming
shared control
uncertain environments
mobile manipulators
human-robot interaction
variable autonomy

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10.3389/frobt.2025.1540476Licence: CC BY 4.0

A mini-review on mobile manipulators with Variable Autonomy
Copyright © 2025 Contreras, Rastegarpanah, Chiou and Stolkin. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Final published version, 413 KBLicence: CC BY 4.0

Cite this

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abstract = "This paper presents a mini-review of the current state of research in mobile manipulators with variable levels of autonomy, emphasizing their associated challenges and application environments. The need for mobile manipulators in different environments, especially hazardous ones such as decommissioning and search and rescue, is evident due to the unique challenges and risks each presents. Many systems deployed in these environments are not fully autonomous, requiring human-robot teaming to ensure safe and reliable operations under uncertainties. Through this analysis, we identify gaps and challenges in the literature on Variable Autonomy, including cognitive workload and communication delays, and propose future directions, including whole-body Variable Autonomy for mobile manipulators, virtual reality frameworks, and large language models to reduce operators{\textquoteright} complexity and cognitive load in some challenging and uncertain scenarios.",

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A mini-review on mobile manipulators with Variable Autonomy

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