A novel intention prediction strategy for a shared control tele-manipulation system in unknown environments

This paper addresses the problem of controlling a slave robot with a shared control scheme of a tele-manipulation system in unknown environments. Shared control schemes may be useful for reducing the communication delay in time-critical tele-manipulation systems. Shared control scheme consists of two key components: intention prediction and command arbitration. An intuitive and novel strategy under which the human operator intention could be extracted seamlessly from the hand point to point path during the tele-manipulation process is developed in this paper. The new strategy is based on the environment scene awareness conducted at the remote side at the beginning of the tele-manipulation task. The developed strategy is tested experimentally with a simulation of a robot model in several remote environments to verify its accuracy and effectiveness. The results confirmed significant performance improvement in terms of reduced time using the proposed shared control scheme compared to the direct tele-manipulation scheme.