Detected Obstacle Avoidance in Teleoperation System with a Virtual Link and Virtual Joints

In teleoperation system, the teleoperator cannot completely understand the situation of the remote site where the slave robot is located. If there is an obstacle in the vicinity of the slave robot, the teleoperator needs a lot of fatigue in order to avoid the obstacle. In this paper, we apply the conventional obstacle avoidance algorithm using the redundancy control if there is an obstacle except for the slave robot end-effector, and we apply the shared redundancy control, which is proposed obstacle avoidance algorithm, if there is an obstacle near the slave robot end-effector. The proposed algorithm avoids obstacles by creating a virtual link and virtual joints to the end-effector of the slave robot. We control the actual robot with the shared redundancy control of the axes added to the virtual robot. The experiment confirms that the proposed method is effective on avoiding an obstacle in teleoperation system.