A new control mode for teleoperated differential drive UGVs

This paper proposes a control mode that enables the users of teleoperated non-holonomic differential drive unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) to interact with the unmanned vehicles in a new way. By introducing an intermediate control layer, a user interface that is very similar to so-called first person shooter (FPS) computer games, e.g. Doom and Half Life, can be created. The advantages of such interfaces is that they are intuitive, and that literally millions of potential future UGV-operators already have spent hundreds of hours training with them. The control mode gives the user direct control of the position and orientation of the on-board camera, while the actual orientation of the vehicle is abstracted away using feedback linearization. Thus, the idea is similar to using inverse kinematics to directly control the position and orientation of a robot arm gripper. The paper first describes the predominant direct vehicle control model, as well as the FPS interfaces. It is then shown how the proper choice of intermediate control layer can make the two equivalent.