An approach to high operational control of a slave mobile robot by master touch manipulation

The master-slave system is expected to be a key technology for the next generation of robots. Indeed, a master-slave system will be utilized in many fields to perform tasks remotely in unknown environments. However, it is difficult for the operator to lead the slave robot to goal position correctly in case of operating the slave robot in remote location since the operator cannot recognize three-dimensional space correctly. The purpose of this research is realization of high operational control of teleoperated mobile robot. With such system, the operator need not spatial recognition, and the proposed system does not depend on the operator's skill, and also the proposed system can be applied to unknown environment. In the proposed system, the operator input the goal position by touch input on the screen which show the camera image. After touch input, the slave robot control the manipulator which mounts laser pointer and illuminates goal position. Then, the slave robot recognizes laser point by stereo camera and move to the goal position automatically. In this research, we utilize the touch input device as the master robot and the two-wheeled robot as the slave robot. Simulation is conducted to verify the validity of the proposed method.