Recently, there has been much work in the field of teleoperation and telerobotics. A branch of research in this field has moved toward telepresence or tele-existence, where a human operator is made to feel that he is located at the task site. In order to construct a human-robot system operating in the real world by utilizing the tele-existence technology, the relationship between human and robot, i.e., the task allocation between them has to be made clear, and to be matched with the purpose of the constructed system.
In this paper, we propose a novel method for allocating tasks to a human operator and a slave-robot by constructing a cognitive information processing model of the human operator when he is engaged in controlling the tele-existence system. By utilizing this method, we introduce an architecture for a semi-autonomous tele-existence mobile robot, where the human operator generates a path for the robot while the robot moves along the path avoiding the obstacles based on the proposed fuzzy control. This architecture enables us to make a prototype system which is to be used in the security system operating in the real world.