Haptic interface for intuitive teleoperation of wheeled and tracked vehicles

In this paper, a novel haptic interface is proposed for general teleoperation of wheeled and tracked vehicle. The new mechanism of the proposed haptic interface shown in Fig. 1 not only allows human operator to easily tele-operate various types of target vehicles including car-like vehicles, mobile robots, tracked vehicles, but also improve the operators´ perception of target vehicles´ operating status and its environment by introducing “cornering feel” in the field of vehicle teleoperation. In addition, the proposed interface enables human operators to give commands to (or drive) target vehicle in a way which is carried out in traditional direct control or driving. Experiments have been done to carefully evaluate and test the performance of the proposed interface. The results have shown that the developed haptic master device is sufficient and suitable for general wheeled and tracked-vehicle teleoperation.