Adaptive Teleoperation of a Mobile Robot under Communication Time Delay

In this paper, we present a concept of adaptive teleoperation of a mobile robot, and describe the theoretical background and experimental results with a real mobile robot. It is not so easy for users to operate a mobile robot in remote environment by observing video sequence of the robot´s view, because the communication time delay in both control and image data becomes a serious problem. In order to overcome this problem, we propose a novel method by utilizing a predicted image sequence generated from the image history obtained from the on-board camera on the robot. Moreover, the robot is operated not only by direct human´s operation, but also in an autonomous manner according to the situation. We discuss that this adaptation mechanism plays an important role in the remote-controlled robot under communication time delay.