Automatic control of a monitoring camera for remote manipulator operation

When a robot is operated remotely, a monitoring camera is often used. In conventional systems, an operator controls both a robot and a monitoring camera. A camera has to be controlled so that its zooming scale and angle are to be desirable for an operator. Therefore, the automatic control of a camera is necessary for smooth operations of a robot. In this paper, the authors proposed a new algorithm to control a monitoring camera automatically. While an operator sends commands to an operated manipulator via a joystick, a monitoring camera is automatically controlled based on the algorithm where the joystick motion information is ingeniously utilized. Experiments were carried out, and an effectiveness of the proposed algorithm was confirmed