Steer assistance for teleoperation

Giat Industries, expert in combat system, designs and integrates the technologies (electrical network, mechanical design, ergonomic and mobility command and control) for the French military and civil robotic. One of the main problems of current robotics is to treat the lack of operator's perception due to teleoperation. The article details the assistance for the steer control part of mobility command and control. The purpose of the assistance is to secure the vehicle, to insure the continuity of the command (in particular for tracked vehicle equipped of hydrostatic steering group), and to adapt the command (to use all the range of the command even at high speed and to adapt the speed to the desired curve). The advantage of the system presented in the article is to filter the order first and to transmit to the actuators only safe orders preserving the vehicle. This approach transforms the telepilot's order watching and correction problem, to a telepilot's order filtering problem. We pass here, from a logical "a posteriori" to a logical of "a priori" processing. The assistance includes: a model of the dynamic behavior of the vehicle and an open loop, some feed forward with appropriate filters and a closed loop. The article presents the result of the command studies from time simulation to "man on the loop" simulation. This system, at present time applied to the French Observation Robot demonstrator SYRANO (developped for the DGA-French Defence Procurement Agency), is the subject of a patent.