Primary-view-consistent Operation Method of Master Controller in Multiple Screen Teleoperation System

Abstract

In teleoperation systems, the reference frame and the posture of the master controller should be consistent to those of the follower arm in the remote environment; otherwise the operator will be forced to perform mental rotation which is a burden for him/her. Such consistencies become more important in the case of multiple screen teleoperation systems, where the operator can change the primary view, for example, among overhead view, side view, and hand camera view, depending on the situation.In this paper, we propose a unified method of master controller that is consistent to the primary view in multiple screen teleoperation systems. We first propose a method for constraining the posture of the master controller during indexing operation in the master-follower mode so that posture consistency can be preserved even when master-follower connection is disengaged. This constraining method will also be applied when the operator changes primary view so that the master controller will be constrained to the posture with respect to a new reference frame. We also propose to assign an appropriate control mode (either position mode or velocity (joy-stick) mode) depending on the selected primary view, where control modes for translational motion and rotational motion are considered separately. We have verified the effectiveness of the proposed method by experiments.