ARTIFICIAL FORCE REFLECTION CONTROL FOR TELEOPERATED MOBILE ROBOTS

This paper presents a new idea of force feedback in the teleoperated m obile robot control: artificial force reflection. It is well known tha t force feedback from slave to master can increase the sense of telepr esence so that task performance can be improved in teleoperation. Ther e has been a great deal of activity in developing force reflection alg orithms, especially in the application of tele-manipulator. However, s uch force feedback control algorithms have rarely appeared in teleoper ated mobile robots because the contact force between an environment an d a mobile robot is not available. In this paper, feedback force for t he teleoperated mobile robot is artificially generated by using range data from an environment. To reflect force to a joystick, we devise a new structure of a joystick with two motors. During an operation, the computed artificial force feeds into motors on the joystick directly s o that an operator can guide the robot, feeling real force which becom es larger as mobile robot moves closer to obstacles. Our method helps the operator to guide the robot more safely, even without any visual c ontact. To verify the validity of our algorithm, we develop the simula tor which consists of the joystick and the visual display system. Thro ugh some experiments using this system, we confirm the validity and th e effectiveness of our new idea of artificial force reflection in the teleoperated mobile robot. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights r eserved.