A Bilateral Teleoperation System for Planetary Rovers

In this paper, a bilateral teleoperation system (BTS) is proposed for planetary rover remote control and operation. This is a continuation of the work presented in on computer-simulated virtual environment, that can be used as a predictive display module in the BTS. In the proposed system, a haptic device is used by the human operators to control planetary rovers as driving a car. Dynamic model of the rover is used and a passive-based bilateral teleoperation scheme is adopted to achieve the stability of the close-loop control. Kinematic model of the rover is used to get the torque distribution algorithm and applied to calculate the corresponding torque for each wheel based on the desired linear speed and heading angle of the rover. Buffer unit is designed to address the issue of variable time-delay caused by the Internet. Lab-based experiments have been carried out using the BH2 rover. The test results demonstrate good performance of the proposed system.