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MINI REVIEW article

Front. Robot. AI
Sec. Industrial Robotics and Automation
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frobt.2025.1540476
This article is part of the Research Topic Advances in Industrial Robotics View all 3 articles

A Mini-Review on Mobile Manipulators with Variable Autonomy

Provisionally accepted
Cesar Alan Contreras Cesar Alan Contreras 1Alireza Rastegarpanah Alireza Rastegarpanah 1*Manolis Chiou Manolis Chiou 2Rustam Stolkin Rustam Stolkin 1
  • 1 University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom
  • 2 Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    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.

    Keywords: Mobile manipulators, Uncertain environments, Variable autonomy, Human-robot teaming, shared control

    Received: 05 Dec 2024; Accepted: 20 Jan 2025.

    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) or licensor 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.

    * Correspondence: Alireza Rastegarpanah, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.