Teleprogramming: overcoming communication delays in remote manipulation

The problem of teleoperation in the presence of feedback delays is addressed. A novel combination of computer graphics and manipulator programming is proposed to solve the problem by allowing the operator to kinesthetically interact with a graphical simulation of the remote environment and to interactively (online) teleprogram the remote manipulator through a sequence of elementary symbolic instructions, which are generated automatically by the operator's station software. The slave robot executes these symbolic commands delayed in time and, should an error occur, reports the relevant information back to the operator's station, where the master environment is reset back to the error state. The hardware architecture of the experimental system is described.<>