Teleoperation of a Mobile Robot Using a Force-Reflection Joystick With Sensing Mechanism of Rotating Magnetic Field

Operators' intelligent and skillful decisions are necessary for the teleoperation of a mobile robot when there are many scattered obstacles. Among the sensors used for environment recognition, the camera is the most popular and powerful. However, there are several limitations in the camera-based teleoperation of a mobile robot. For example, shadowed and curved areas cannot be viewed using a narrow view-angle camera, especially in an environment with bad illumination and several obstacles. Therefore, it is necessary to have other sensory information for reliable teleoperations. In this study, 16 ultrasonic sensors are attached around a mobile robot in a ring pattern to measure the distances to the obstacles and a collision vector is introduced as a new tool for obstacle avoidance, which is defined as the normal vector from an obstacle to the mobile robot. Based on this collision vector, a virtual reflection force is generated to avoid the obstacles and then the reflection force is transferred to the operator who is holding the joystick used to control the mobile robot. Based on this reflection force, the operator can control the mobile robot more smoothly and safely. For this bidirectional teleoperation, a master joystick system using a two-axis hall sensor was designed to eliminate the nonlinear region, which exists in a general joystick with two motors and potentiometers. The effectiveness of the collision vector and force-reflection joystick is verified by comparing two vision-based teleoperation experiments, with and without force reflection.