Development of a Hydraulic Tele-Operated Construction Robot using Virtual Reality

Abstract In this study, we have developed a bilateral telerobotics system for a construction robot using virtual reality. The system consists of a servo-controlled construction robot, two joysticks for operation of the robot from a remote place, and a three degrees of freedom motion base. The operator of the robot sits on the motion base and controls the robot bilaterally from a remote place. The role of the motion base is to realistically simulate the motion of the construction robot. In this study, firstly, we propose a new method of master-slave control in order to make better feedback feeling of the reaction force to the joystick for the tele-operated construction robot. Secondly, we tested the visual feedback system for the construction robot using CCD video camera and computer graphics. For tele-operations, a video image of the operation field is normally projected onto a screen to assist the operator. In this study, an additional computer graphics (CG) was generated as a virtual robot to the real video image in order to present the end condition of the robot arm. The usefulness of the system is confirmed by the experiments in this study.