Human–Robot Shared Control for Path Generation and Execution

Abstract

A telerobotic system consists of integrating an operator into the control loop of a remote robot. Due to safety considerations, it is very important sometimes that the operator be able to remotely take control of the task and the robot. In this paper, a shared control mode for mobile robots is defined according to the operator ability to control the robot and the autonomy level of the robot itself. In this mode, the task execution is simultaneously accomplished by the operator and the robot, according to the percentage of the task-share coefficient. This depends on several factors such as robot autonomy, user ability, environment accessibility and task difficulty. An experimental application of the developed shared control for path generation task execution is planned for a non-holonomic mobile robot evolving inside a workspace cluttered with static obstacles. In this case, Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines curves are used to generate the robot path linking the Starting point I and the Target point F. The operator can control the robot even by selecting or inserting new control points on the initial feasible path, or by directly moving the robot via the developed Human/Robot Interface or the joystick.