Bilateral Coupling of Human/AI Control Robots and Field Robots for Guided and Autonomous Teleoperation

In this paper, we introduce and experimentally evaluate a novel bilateral control teleoperation strategy of mobile robots. As complexity in the tasks increases, automation becomes necessary. In case a mobile robot lacks the capability to be completely autonomous, it can rely on a fully or partially autonomous robot for its control. The practical implementation of such a strategy entails a mobile robot system divided into master-labor over a communication channel where labor resides on the site of operation guided by an autonomous agent (Master) from a remote location maintained over a network. Master robot is capable of autonomous navigation through an advanced SLAM-based path planning algorithm while the labor robot is only capable of tracking Master’s subscribed odometry force and communicate feedback to the Master interactive of its contact to the environment. Master by the way of the system is capable of force tracking the labor as well as guaranteeing the stability of the robotic system. In case, the master tends to veer off its intended trajectory, minimal human operator intervention is added as an additional layer to prevent detouring. We validate the proposed scheme by proposed prioritized path planning in a bilateral teleoperation by guided autonomous navigation from the master with respect to force feedback received from the labor in terms of transparency, stability and performance i.e. navigation time, position tracking and end goal accuracy while keeping in check the impact of network delay and throughput of the control loop.