A Remote Control System with Combination of Manual and Automatic Control Using Gripping Force

In this paper, we propose a new method to combine manual and automatic controls for remote controlled robots using gripping force. An important issue in the remote control system is how to combine the manual and automatic controls, namely, how to determine the mixing ratio of the two controls. We propose to adopt the gripping force of a joystick for this purpose because humans seem to grip the joystick tightly when they want to operate the robot aggressively and in emergency situations. First, we confirmed this tendency and identified relationship between the gripping force and the urgency of operation. An experimental system to simulate a remote controlled robot, consisting of a force feedback joystick with a pressure sensor and an image of working field on a display is developed. We compared several remote control methods on the developed simulator and found that the proposed method has superiority against other methods in many aspects.