Cooperative teleoperation of a multirobot system with force reflection via Internet

With the rapid development of information technology, the Internet has evolved from a simple data-sharing media to an amazing information world where people can enjoy various services. Recently, the use of the Internet has been expanded to the field of automation, i.e., using the Internet as a tool to control equipment located at remote sites. This work presents a system that enables multiple operators at different sites to cooperatively control multiple robots with real-time force reflecting via the Internet. To overcome instability and reliability problems caused by random time delay of the Internet communication, we adopt an event as the reference for the controller design. To improve real-time efficiency and reduce the complexity of the controller, a distributed approach is proposed for the control of remote robots, so that the time delay in one control loop does not affect performance of the others. A vision-based method is developed to monitor and render interactions between the robots. The usefulness and effectiveness of the developed method and system have been verified by teleoperation experiments on a two-robots cooperative system among Hong Kong, mainland China, and the U.S.