A testbed for a unified teleoperated-autonomous dual-arm robotic system

A description is given of a complete robot control facility built at the CIT Jet Propulsion Laboratory as part of a NASA telerobotic program to develop a state-of-the-art robot control environment for laboratory-based spacelike experiments. This system has the following features: separation of the computing facilities into local and remote sites, autonomous motion generation in joint or Cartesian coordinates, dual-arm force reflecting teleoperation with voice interaction between the operator and the robots, shared control between the autonomously generated motions and operator controlled teleoperation, and dual-arm coordinated trajectory generation. The system has been used to carry out realistic experiments such as the exchange of an orbital replacement unit, bolt turning, and door opening, using a mixture of autonomous actions and teleoperation, with either a single arm or two cooperating arms