Development of a multi-telerobot system for remote collaboration

Mechanical Engineering Laboratory (MEL) is developing technologies for multi-robot collaboration in remote environments together with the Toshiba Mechanical Systems Laboratory (TMSL). Human operators' delayed visual perception due to the communication delay over the network seriously affects the collaboration performance in the Multi-Operator-Multi-Robot (MOMR) tele-manipulation and accordingly requires an additional supplementary medium to guide the operators. We have built an experimental tele-manipulation test bed connecting the MEL and the TMSL to research the time-delayed remote tele-collaboration between two places. In the test bed, one operator controls her master robot nearby two slave robots in the work site and another from a distance. A local on-line graphics simulator without time delay is developed to cope with the communication delay and several multi-robot coordinated control strategies are devised to avoid the collision. To verify the validity of this simulator assisted approach, we have demonstrated a maintenance work on a plant mock-up in the TMSL by two different slave robots and two distant operators in the MEL and the TMSL respectively through an Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN).