Telerobotic mini-golf: system design for enhanced teleoperator performance

This paper discusses the safety assurance, capability features, and user-friendliness of Internet-based telerobotics, in the sense that how these features could be incorporated in order to enhance teleoperator performance. A comprehensive set of safety features are incorporated to the interface to screen and accept only the safe commands from the remote operator while discarding risky commands. A laser pointer is used to help remote operator in perceiving self-location and navigation, whereas orientation control has been completely automated and synchronized to the position commands of the teleoperator. The effectiveness of these features has been demonstrated by playing telerobotic mini-golf.

I. Introduction

Internet-based telerobotics is just about a decade old [1], yet by today, there are a wide range of devices being teleoperated on the Internet [2]. Telerobotics and teleoperations. will be more appealing and applicable in the future particularly in space systems, hazardous tasks such as fire-fighting. warfront operations, and search and rescue operations, which have turned out to be the current needs of the world. Teleoperations that span long distances over transmission networks deal with substantially long time-delays, which could cause some of the high frequency signals to undergo positive feedback in the control loop. As a result, the control system could become unstable [3]. Alternatively, move-and-wait technique [4]. has been adapted for teleoperations in its very early development stages, and still in the main stream of teleoperation techniques. Supervisory control [5] has been the most popular strategy for stable teleoperations in that the tasks are decomposed into simple subtasks, each of which can be planned and executed by a local controller.