Real time path smoothing schemes in teleoperation system

The Robot Teleoperation System (RTS) based on telepresence, which is aided financially by the National 863 High-Tech Development Plan, was set up by the State Key Laboratory of Intelligence Technology and Systems. This system consists of three main parts: robot control, stereo vision and hand gesture tracking. The controlled robot and the operator form a closed loop, and the operator views the robot´s status and the environment through the stereo vision subsystem. RTS is developed from SAROT (an intelligent assembly robot system), which is logically divided into 5 layers: real time control, monitoring and coordination, motion planning, task scheduling and task planning. The paper proposes several active “path smoothing” schemes implemented in the system, which carry out the operator´s hand gesture tracking in 7 DOF (position: 3, orientation: 3, and pitch: 1)