Dynamic session management for telerobotic control and simulation

Session management of a telerobotic operation is an important aspect which has not been adequately addressed by the research community. This paper describes work performed by the Universities Space Automation/Robotics Consortium (USARC) which allows dynamic configuration and monitoring of a telerobotic system which is distributed over a wide-area network. The Telerobotic Session Manager (TSM) allows the session manager to coordinate control among multiple operators, to perform task handoffs or to control multiple robots. This provides greater modularity and reconfigurability than previous telerobot control systems. Motion control of the telerobot is provided by a generic robot motion controller which receives configuration information from TSM. Real or virtual environments are simulated by predictive simulation software which is also configured via TSM. This paper describes TSM, the motion controller, the simulation system, and a variety of tasks which have been performed by the system