Bilateral force feedback control for a vehicle-type tele-mobility system

This paper discusses the development of a vehicle-type tele-mobility system, and proposes a novel control structure on the basis of bilateral control with dimensional scaling taking into account a braking effect. In the field of teleoperations of mobile systems, information on work objects at a remote site is necessary for precise and safe manipulations. Conventionally, audiovisual information is fed back to the operators. However, these approaches cannot fully deal with contact conditions owing to the lack of force information. To tackle this problem, a mobile-hapto has been proposed. In the configuration of this system, the master system is a joystick, whereas the slave system is a mobile robot. From the standpoint of the operability of mobile robots, the master system should comprise not only joysticks but also pedals and steering handle, similar to automobile systems. Furthermore, for actual manipulations, visual information is essential in addition to force information. The proposed system addresses the above requirements, and it is expected that the functionality of the mobile robot systems will be enhanced and facilitated. The applicability of the developed system and the proposed control structure are experimentally confirmed.