Many practical problems can be understood as the search for a state of affairs that extends a fixed partial state of affairs, the environment, while satisfying certain conditions that are formally specified. Such problems are found in, for example, engineering, law or economics. We study this class of problems in a context where some of the relevant information about the environment is not known by the user at the start of the search. During the search, the user may consider tentative solutions that make implicit hypotheses about these unknowns. To ensure that the solution is appropriate, these hypotheses must be verified by observing the environment. Furthermore, we assume that, in addition to knowledge of what constitutes a solution, knowledge of general laws of the environment is also present. We formally define partial solutions with enough verified facts to guarantee the existence of complete and appropriate solutions. Additionally, we propose an interactive system to assist the user in their search by determining (1) which hypotheses implicit in a tentative solution must be verified in the environment, and (2) which observations can bring useful information for the search. We present an efficient method to over-approximate the set of relevant information, and evaluate our implementation.

Teleoperation, one of the oldest areas of robotics, has experienced considerable growth in the last two decades. Main causes for this trend are the need for increased safety levels for human operators and lower production costs. In this work, a three d.o.f. local manipulator (two d.o.f. for force and one d.o.f. for torque) is developed. This hand controller, intended for robot or mobile teleoperation systems, has force reflection in two axes and torque reflection in the third axis. using a robotic hand developed at INAUT as a remote device, laboratory experiments on each axis (one at a time) have shown good results. An impedance controller at the remote system allows one to carry out interactive tasks with the environment such as polishing, insertion and grinding, where it is necessary to control and accommodate the interaction forces and torques in order to avoid hazards for both the manipulated objects and the remote robot.