Dynamic authority distribution for cooperative teleoperation

Dividing the control authority of the slave robot among operators, based on the available information to them and their controlling strategy, is absolutely essential for cooperative teleoperation systems. Although there have been many studies on this, most of the analysis were limited to fixed authority and its effect on stability. None of the research has discussed how to allocate the control authority in real-time. This paper presents a dynamic authority distribution method for dual master single slave Cooperative Teleoperation systems, which allocates the authority over slave to operators on the move in each DOF separately. This method observes the energy interaction in the kinesthetic coupling link between the operators, classifies the interaction into operators´ leader/follower behavior and adapts the authorities accordingly. The proposed method is experimentally tested with unique set of camera views of task environment with 3DOF dual master single slave teleoperation system. Experimental results demonstrate accurate convergence of decomposition of authorities based on camera-view. The performance of proposed dynamic authority architecture is evaluated by comparing total energy generation with fixed authority setup, and is found to be more efficient in terms of less energy generation, and hence less effort is required by operators to execute the task.