Verification of usability of teleoperation system using past image records by sharing information obtained from external cameras

In recent years, teleoperated robots have been used for various tasks. In conventional methods for remotely controlling a robot, an operator uses images obtained from a camera mounted on the robot. However, because the view in this case is a first-person´s view, it is difficult for the operator to recognize the robot´s position and the distance between the robot and obstacles. We have previously proposed a teleoperation system that presents a virtual bird´s-eye view to the operator. The scene displayed to the operator is generated by superimposing a virtual model of the robot on a past real image, called a “background image”. In this paper, we propose a method of selecting an optimal background image from past real image records by sharing information obtained from external cameras. We verified the usability of the teleoperation system with the proposed method.