Scaled telerobotic control of a manipulator in real time with laser assistance for ADL tasks

In this paper we present a novel concept of shared autonomous and teleoperation control of a remote manipulator with a laser-based assistance in a hard real-time environment for people with disabilities to perform activities of daily living (ADL). The laser pointer enables the user to make high-level decisions, such as target object selection, and it enables the system to generate a trajectories and virtual constraints to be used for autonomous motion or scaled teleoperation. Autonomous, position-teleoperation and velocity-teleoperation control methods have been implemented in the control code. Scaling and virtual fixtures have been used in the teleoperation based control depending on the user preference.A real-time QNX operating system has been used to control a PUMA 560 robotic arm using a Phantom Omni master through a TCP/IP port. A SICK laser range finder was used to for the telerobotic control. The system was implemented with different control modes, and three healthy human subjects were trained to use the system for a pick-and-place task. Data were collected and presented for different control modes, and a comparison between these modes based on the time to complete the task was presented.