Simultaneous Use of Autonomy Guidance Haptic Feedback and Obstacle Avoiding Force Feedback for Mobile Robot Teleoperation

In teleoperation, force feedback is used not only for feedback on interactions with the environment such as contact but also as a method of providing a virtual guide to support the operator perform tasks efficiently. In particular, in shared teleoperation, which is a method of assisting the operator using autonomy to improve task efficiency and reduce fatigue, force feedback is used as a key means of haptically providing a guide of autonomy to the operator to achieve efficient collaboration. However, it is difficult to use these force guides concurrently with force feedback on interactions. This is because not only the interaction force and the virtual guidance force offset each other when those forces have different directions, but also the interaction force and the virtual guidance force cannot be distinguished, making it difficult for the operator to be aware of the situation. In this paper, we propose a method to solve this problem by assigning different force magnitudes through the different stiffness for each method and for the simultaneous use of both methods. The proposed method is verified through mobile robot teleoperation experiments on the simulation environment, and the experiment result shows that the proposed method performed better than when only one type of force feedback is used.