Maneuverability and grasping experiments in teleoperation of nonholonomic/twin-armed robots

Three sets of human factors experiments are carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of a number of new control strategies in teleoperation of nonholonomic mobile and/or dual-arm robots. First, a single operator's performance in maneuvering a nonholonomic slave robot is assessed. Another single operator experiment in remote grasping using a dual-arm two-master/two-slave configuration is then performed. The controllers used in these single-operator experiments are then combined and re-evaluated under a dual-operator teleoperation task involving both mobile base motion and object grasping. The cooperative teleoperation control experiments employed a custom-built mobile twin-armed robotic platform with multiple camera viewpoints. The results show that the use of a 3DOF master with position mapping and reflection of the nonholonomic constraint would improve maneuverability of a nonholonomic mobile slave/base compared to approaches employing a 2DOF master interface. More specifically, the task-completion-time and unintentional contacts/collisions decrease. In the twin-armed grasping experiments, the application of the so called “soft” constraints via passive semi-autonomous control reduces task-completion-time and unwanted block drops in a block grasping/stacking task.