Use of coordinated online graphics simulator in collaborative multi-robot teleoperation with time delay

Coordinated control technologies have been developed for multi-robot collaboration in a common environment remotely controlled from multiple operators physically at a distance from each other. To verify the validity of the proposed approaches, we built a test bed and conducted a series of experiments, where we learned the effect of communication delay over the network on the performance of telerobots. This paper discusses the use of an online predictive simulator in the multi-operator-multi-robot (MOMR) tele-collaborative system to cope with the operator's delay visual perception over the network with time delay. In the test bed, each operator controls his/her master device to control two slave robots to cooperate in a task and detect a priori the possibility of collision in the graphics simulator that runs in near real-time. We demonstrate various tasks performed by two slave robots and two operators through LAN subjected to the simulated delays, and evaluate the use of the predictive simulator in MOMR tele-collaboration.