Design of a master device for the teleoperation of wheeled and tracked vehicles

This paper presents a novel interface for the intuitive teleoperation of wheeled and tracked vehicles. The key contributions are a new mechanism of proposed interface and matching strategies. The new mechanism not only allows human operator to easily give command to a target vehicle in teleoperation of wheeled and tracked vehicles, but also improve the operators´ perception of target vehicle and its environment. The joint-variable and DOF matching strategies are proposed to match the proposed interface to various target vehicles. With the proposed interface, the manner of giving commands in teleoperation becomes similar to the traditional method of direct driving a passenger car. The possibility and performance of the proposed interface and strategies have been tested in both computer based semi-experiments. The results have shown that the developed haptic master device is sufficient and suitable for wheeled and tracked-vehicle teleoperation and control and the proposed matching rules are benefit and easy to be applied to different types of slave configurations.