Development of a telepresence robot with adaptive shared controller
Jin‐Siang Shaw, Chun-Han Yang · Journal of the Chinese Institute of Engineers · 2019
This study presents the design and control of a telepresence robot based on an omnidirectional mobile platform. A personal computer is used as a user interface for communication via internet to a laptop computer placed on the mobile platform. The laptop computer receives user’s commands to control the mobile robot. Collisions of robot with obstacle can still occur during remote controlling because of the limitation of a fixed camera on the robot and/or internet latency. We first use an artificial potential field to prevent these collisions, and then design an adaptive shared controller (ASC) to improve the performance. This ASC method modulates the weights of human control and assistance control online not only according to environmental factors, but also based on the user’s control performance. Meanwhile, we use the iterated closest point (ICP) algorithm to build a map for providing user functional reference. The experimental results show that ASC is efficient in both obstacle avoidance and user workload reduction.