Model-based, delay-tolerant teleoperation in unstructured environments

The problem of teleoperation in the presence of communication delays is addressed. Because of the delay in obtaining position and force feedback from the remote slave arms, direct teleoperation is not feasible. A combination of computer graphics and manipulator programming is proposed to solve the problem by allowing the operator to kinesthetically, as well as visually, interact with a graphical simulation of the remote environment and to interactively (online) teleprogram the remote manipulator through a sequence of elementary symbolic instructions, which are generated automatically by the operator´s station software. The slave robot executes these symbolic commands delayed in time and, should an error occur, reports the relevant information back to the operator´s station, where the master environment is reset to the error state