Teleprogramming: overcoming communication delays in remote manipulation

The problem of teleoperation in the presence of feedback delays is addressed. A novel combination of computer graphics and manipulator programming is proposed to solve the problem by allowing the operator to kinesthetically 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 back to the error state. The hardware architecture of the experimental system is described