Adaptive Teleoperation of a Mobile Robot under Communication Time Delay

In this paper, we present a concept of adaptive teleoperation of a mobile robot, and describe the theoretical background and experimental results with a real mobile robot. It is not so easy for users to operate a mobile robot in remote environment by observing video sequence of the robot's view, because the communication time delay in both control and image data becomes a serious problem. In order to overcome this problem, we propose a novel method by utilizing a predicted image sequence generated from the image history obtained from the on-board camera on the robot. Moreover, the robot is operated not only by direct human's operation, but also in an autonomous manner according to the situation. We discuss that this adaptation mechanism plays an important role in the remote-controlled robot under communication time delay.