Towards a self-collision aware teleoperation framework for compound robots

This work lays the foundations of a self-collision aware teleoperation framework for compound robots. The need of an haptic enabled system which guarantees self-collision and joint limits avoidance for complex robots is the main motivation behind this paper. The objective of the proposed system is to constrain the user to teleoperate a slave robot inside its safe workspace region through the application of force cues on the master side of the bilateral teleoperation system. A series of simulated experiments have been performed on the Kuka KMRiiwa mobile robot; however, due to its generality, the framework is prone to be easily extended to other robots. The experiments have shown the applicability of the proposed approach to ordinary teleoperation systems without altering their stability properties. The benefits introduced by this framework enable the user to safely teleoperate whichever complex robotic system without worrying about self-collision and joint limitations

A Tele-Operated Display With a Predictive Display Algorithm

Tele-operated display systems with head mounted displays (HMD) are becoming popular as visual feedback systems for tele-operation systems. However, the users are suffered from time-varying bidirectional delays caused by the latency and limited bandwidth of wireless communication networks. Here, we develop a tele-operated display system and a predictive display algorithm allowing comfortable use of HMDs by operators of tele-operation systems. Inspired by the kinematic model of the human head-neck complex, we built a robot neck-camera system to capture the field of view in any desired orientation. To reduce the negative effects of the time-varying bidirectional communication delay and operation delay of the robot neck, we developed a predictive display algorithm based on a kinematic model of the human/robot neck-camera system, and a geometrical model of a camera. Experimental results showed that the system provide predicted images with high frame rate to the user