Behavior-Based Approach for Cooperative Control of a Haptic-Driven Mobile Robot

This paper addresses the obstacle avoidance performance of a tele-operated wheeled mobile robot. The robot is equipped with both a camera and a laser range sensor to acquire the necessary data from the surrounding. The communication between the operator and the robot is established by means of a force-feedback haptic joystick. In order to tackle go-to-goal and obstacle avoidance tasks, behavior-based control methodology has been used. The results of the study show that the proposed cooperative control approach is superior to both fully manual and fully autonomous behavior-based control in terms of number of collisions, time consumed to accomplish the tasks and also the cognitive pressure on the operator.