Development of a multi-telerobot system for remote collaboration

The Mechanical Engineering Laboratory (MEL) is developing technologies for multi-robot collaboration in remote environments with the Toshiba Mechanical Systems Laboratory (TMSL). Human operators´ delayed visual perception due to the communication delay over the network seriously affects the collaboration performance in the multi-operator-multi-robot tele-manipulation. We have built an experimental tele-manipulation test bed connecting the MEL and the TMSL to study the time-delayed remote tele-collaboration between two places. In the test bed, one operator controls her master robot nearby two slave robots in the work site and another from a distance. A local online graphics simulator without time delay is developed to cope with the communication delay and several multi-robot coordinated control strategies are devised to avoid the collision. To verify the validity of this simulator assisted approach, we demonstrated a maintenance work on a plant mock-up in the TMSL by two different slave robots and two distant operators in the MEL and TMSL respectively through an ISDN