Task planner design based on Petri net for multi-robot teleoperation over Internet

Significant research have been devoted into the field of multi-robot teleoperation system over Internet. However, the low safety and efficiency due to time delay and complexity between multiple robots and operators prevent the teleoperation technology from developing. Specially, the possible collision between multiple robots has a great effect on the Internet-based multi-operator-multi-robot teleoperation system. In this paper, a task planner based on Petri net theory was proposed to assist multi-operators coordinate multi-robots. The conception of implicit elementary operation and explicit elementary operation were introduced to realize modeling and automatic plan of the system. In the multi-operator multi-robot system bunt by us, a supervisory controller was designed based on the place invariants not only to lead two operators' manipulation with virtual environment but also to restrict the state of two robots' motion during their work. An experiment via network was carried out to evaluate the validity of the task planner for the medical research of highly dangerous virus such as SARS, bird flu etc. The experimental results show that the safety and efficiency of the system can be improved using the task planner.