Shared control of a pan tilt camera on an all terrain mobile robot

Inspection of an environment is often limited to a single video feed, provenient from a camera assembled on a mobile robot. This is known as the keyhole effect. In addition to this, the operator must often perform several tasks at the same time and specially in cluttered environments it can be hard to navigate the robot and at the same time keep the viewpoint of a camera aligned with a specific point of interest. This paper tackles this problem by proposing two mechanisms for assisting in teleoperation by positioning a pan-tilt camera. The goal consists in improving the teleoperator’s situation awareness. Field trials with a pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera mounted on an all-terrain robot validate the proposed mechanisms. 1