Active camera control with obstacle avoidance for remote operations with industrial manipulators: Implementation and experimental results

Remote controlled robots on offshore oil and gas platforms can potentially reduce costs and improve environment, health and safety issues. A key to successful remote control is to provide onshore operators with a sufficient overview of the processes offshore. To this end, robot manipulators constitute flexible camera platforms, compared to e.g. simple pan-tilt units, for monitoring offshore operations. In this paper, we present a system solution and experimental results for real-time active camera control with obstacle avoidance for industrial manipulators based on weighted pseudoinverse redundancy resolution method. We extend the pseudoinverse solution for joint limit avoidance in combination with obstacle avoidance such that joint limits are gracefully avoided. A novel choice of stereographic projection provides robustness with respect to global stability and singularities. Implementation issues are addressed and the monitoring approach is experimentally validated on two Kuka KR-16 robot manipulators. Experimental results show that a follower robot with a camera is able to monitor and track a leader robot while simultaneously avoiding collisions. In addition, a robot control system architecture which ensures efficient and safe testing of new Matlab-implemented robot controllers is presented.