Improvement of operability of tele-operation system for legged rescue robot

In recent years, various robots have been developed for operations in dangerous environments such as those found after large-scale disasters. Most of the conventional rescue robots are controlled by tele-operation. We have developed an intuitive tele-operation system, called the virtual marionette system, in order to improve the operability of a legged rescue robot. A previous study showed that one of the problems of the virtual marionette system was a low success rate in a ladder recovery task. To solve this problem, we introduced a force presentation function based on the determination of the contact between an environmental CG model and a robot CG model in a virtual space. In addition, an arrow indication and dolly function for the viewpoint was newly installed to improve the operability visually.