Tele-presence: feedback and control of a twin armed mobile robot

Robots are often required to function in areas that are too dangerous or expensive for direct human labour. Unfortunately the unstructured nature of many of these environments and complexity of the task make autonomous operation impossible and tele-operation is essential. A variety of tele-operated devices are available to assist the operator, but in general control of the actions is not truly intuitive. Ideally the operator would wish to input body motions (from legs, arm, hand and head) which the robot would duplicate, and receive from the remote sensors, feedback of a quality and form comparable with that normally sensed. This work considers the development and testing of enhanced input, control and feedback (visual audio and tactile) systems for a twin armed mobile robot to be used in tele-presence applications. In particular the authors focus on the performance of the operator in controlled motion and manipulation tasks. These tests involve assessment of the usefulness of tactile, video and audio feedback parameters including: wide/narrow angle field of view, colour/monochrome, stereo/mono vision and audio. The performance is assessed in terms of the ease of training, time to perform simple functions and accuracy of task completion.<<ETX>>