Bilateral teleoperation of a planetary rover under communication constraints

This thesis work addresses the bilateral teleoperation of a planetary rover, named MERLIN (Mobile Experimental Robot for Localization and Intelligent Navigation), which is currently available for research. The teleoperation platform is built up between the rover and a haptic device. The haptic device provides a force-feedback mechanism, which describes the environmental conditions regarding the obstacles, based on the ranging information from the rover. Therefore, obstacle avoidance can be achieved independent of the visualization of the environment, which, on the other hand, will reduce the communication burden. This can be highly desirable in low-light conditions and in remote teleoperation cases, in which difficulties may arise in visualizing the surroundings. Communication delay is the main concern in this thesis work, because it will result in poor performance of the overall system and even lead to instability of the closed- loop teleoperation. The technology developed in this thesis work will improve the quality of navigating MERLIN rovers. Furthermore, this work will provide basics for teleoperation of multiple mobile robots, as well as robotic maneuvers by means of mobile manipulators. Major contributions of this thesis work include: 1. Build-up of a bilateral teleoperation platform on MERLIN: 2. Extension of the control strategy in virtual-mass model to the application on a car-like rover: implementation of wave-variable method onto this model: 3. Implementation of Sliding-Mode based robust impedance teleoperation in this platform: 4. Experimental study and performance evaluation of the overall bilateral teleoperation system in different scenarios.Validerat; 20101217 (root