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 simulations were carried out and the results of the evaluation metrics were discussed. Additionally, we present experiments where a user teleoperates a mobile robot via the Internet connection between Argentina and Italy.