Laser-assisted real-time and scaled telerobotic control of a manipulator for defense and security applications

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel concept of shared autonomous and teleoperation control of a remote manipulator with a laser-based assistance in a hard real-time environment for defense and security applications. The laser pointer enables the user to make high-level decisions, such as target object selection, and it enables the system to generate trajectories and virtual constraints to be used for autonomous motion or scaled teleoperation. Autonomous, position-teleoperation and velocity-teleoperation control methods have been implemented in the control code. Scaling and virtual fixtures have been used in the teleoperation-based control, depending on the user preference, for faster and easier target locking and task execution. A real-time QNX operating system has been used to remotely control a PUMA 560 robotic arm using a Phantom Omni haptic device as a master through a TCP/IP port. The system was implemented with different control modes, and human subjects were trained to use the system to execute several tasks. Examples of defense and security applications were explored and presented.