Towards safe real-time robot teleoperation: automatic whole-sensitive arm collision avoidance frees the operator for global control

Recent results in sensor-based motion planning suggest that the collision avoidance task can be handled automatically, thus freeing the operator for global control. Whole-sensitive arm manipulators bodies are covered with a sensitive skin sensor to detect nearby objects are proposed for this purpose. The data from the sensitive skin is used with the sensor data processing and motion planning algorithms to avoid collisions for the entire robot arm body in an unknown or time-varying environment. The result is a highly efficient, safe, and robust hybrid system in which the shift motion control between the operator and the automatic system is done transparently and in real-time. The motion of the master arm is either executed faithfully, or, to avoid collisions, is used as general guidance for the slave arm