Development of robot remote controller "Armrest Joystick" — Study of bilateral remote control

Robots have been strongly demanded to substitute humans for tasks at dangerous places such as indoor and outdoor disaster sites or minefields. Most of these robots are remotely controlled by human operators with controllers which consist of joysticks and buttons. But we think it is an urgent issue to control robots more intuitively and quickly for this type of remote control systems. Therefore, the robot operators have strongly demanded a Master-Slave controller for more comfortable remote control. At the same time, it is very important that the controllers have not only operability but also portability because urgency is very important at the dangerous places. In this research, we proposed a robot remote controller "Armrest Joystick" with both high operability and portability. The Armrest Joystick is a Master-Slave controller with a foldable chair for outdoors; therefore, we can carry it easily and operate the robot´s 7DOF, 3DOF for the position, 3DOF for the posture, and 1DOF for the gripper. It includes some mechanisms to compensate the controller´s weight and make the operator move the controller in a wide operation range. In addition, the bilateral control is installed on the Armrest Joystick, and we can intuitively feel environment around the slave robot. In this paper, we present an introductions about the Armrest Joystick and experiments to validate the effectiveness of the bilateral control.