Human-Centered Control Scheme for Delayed Bilateral Teleoperation of Mobile Robots

Abstract

Teleoperation task performance strongly depends on how well the human operator´s commands are executed. In this paper, we propose a control scheme for delayed bilateral teleoperation of mobile robots that considers user´s commands execution in order to achieve a high performance teleoperation system in some important aspects like time to complete the task, safety and operator dependence. We describe some evaluation metrics that allow us to address these aspects and a quantitative metric is proposed and incorporated in the control scheme to compensate wrong commands. A force feedback is applied to the master at the local site as a haptic cue. In addition, the system stability is analyzed taking into consideration the master and remote robot dynamic models and the asymmetric time-varying delays of the communication channel. Multiple human-in-the-loop (HITL) simulations were carried out and the results of the evaluation metrics were discussed. Additionally, we present experiments where a user tele-operates a mobile robot via Internet connection between Argentina and Italy.