CONSTRUCTION TELE-ROBOTIC SYSTEM WITH VIRTUAL REALITY

Abstract

In this study, we investigated a tele-robotics system for a construction machine.The system consists of a servocontrolled construction robot, two joysticks for controlling the robot from a remote place, and a 3-degrees-of-freedom motion base. The operator of the robot sits on the motion base and controls the robot bilaterally from a remote place. The role of the motion base is to realistically simulate the motion of the construction robot. As a tool for assisting the operator, a stereo video graphic of the operation field is projected on a screen.If, in addition to the video graphics, computer graphics (CG) of the robot were to be presented to the operator, the tasking efficiency could be expected to increase. To confirm this, a CG of a virtual robot was created, and its effectiveness for a task involving carrying an object was determined in this study. This system can present the position or shape of the task object by means of a stereo vision system. The results of the experiment clarified that tasking time was shortened effectively even for amateur operators. Thus, the usefulness of the developed CG system was confirmed.