A haptic shared control approach to teleoperation of mobile robots

In robot teleoperation, the fusion of human manual control and robot autonomy can greatly improve its ability to accomplish dynamic and complex operations and tasks. In this paper, an innovative haptic shared controller has been proposed for teleoperation of mobile robots. The robot autonomy and human intervention are both taken into account, and further, passivity from human operation to robot motion is guaranteed by the design of the impedance and admittance models. The control algorithm has been implemented on a versatile haptic interface omega.7, taking advantage of its force feedback capability that allows composite realization of impedance as well as admittance models, and the QBot mobile robot. Teleoperation experiments with omega.7 and the QBot robot has validated the algorithm.