Design and experimental study of a shared-controlled omnidirectional mobile platform

It is usually difficult to remote control of a mobile robot using only an onboard camera. The robot can easily bump into an obstacle due to limited view angle of the on-site scene. This paper presents a shared-control design for effective remote control of an omnidirectional mobile platform. The platform is able to move in any direction without changing robot´s heading, and a stable camera view is available for remote control. A user interface is designed for a smart phone/tablet to remote control the robot using a touch panel. The proposed controller determines the human and robot interactive gains by computing user´s confidence factor. In this approach, the robot assists a user to manipulate its motion from a remote site by compensating local insufficiency of human remote control. Practical experiments validate the proposed design and demonstrate that the proposed shared-control approach of an omnidirectional platform can have potential use for future home service tasks.