Abstract
In this paper, the relationship between a slave robot and the uncertain remote environment is modeled as the impedance to generate the virtual force to feed back to the operator. For the control of a tele-operated mobile robot equipped with camera, the tele-operated mobile robot take pictures of remote environment and sends the visual information back to the operator over the Internet. Because of the limitation of communication bandwidth and narrow view-angles of camera, it is not possible to watch the environment clearly, especially shadow and curved areas. To overcome this problem, the virtual force is generated according to both the distance between the obstacle and robot and the approaching velocity of the obstacle. This virtual force is transferred back to the master over the Internet and the master(two degrees of freedom joystick), which can generate force, enables a human operator to estimate the position of obstacle in the remote environment. By holding this master, in spite of limited visual information, the operator can feel the spatial sense against the remote environment. This force reflection improves the performance of a tele-operated mobile robot significantly.