Design and experiment of a human-touch robot

In this paper we propose a shared-control based teleoperation design for a dual-arm omnidirectional mobile robot. The robot not only can adapt its motion to environment autonomously, but also move according to the user's remote commands. To achieve this goal, a shared-control scheme for effective remote control of the mobile robot is developed. For tele-presence and remote control, a user interface is designed for a smart phone/tablet. The proposed controller determines the human and autonomy control gains by computing user's confidence factor. In this approach, the robot assists a user to manipulate its motion from a remote site by compensating local insufficiency of human remote control. Practical experiments validate the proposed design and demonstrate that the proposed shared-control approach of a dual-arm omnidirectional mobile robot can have potential use for future home service tasks.