Automatic Obstacle Avoidance using Redundancy for Shared Controlled Telerobot Manipulator

In this paper, a novel obstacle avoidance method is developed in the framework of shared control for teleoperation robot manipulator, such that the human operator only need to tele-operate the end-effector motion of the manipulator, while the manipulator will avoid obstacle by itself without sacrificing the end-effector performance by using its joint space redundancy. The obstacle is detected using Kinect (R) sensor, and a novel obstacle avoidance method is used based on the general solution of the inverse kinematic problem. By employment of an artificial parallel system of the teleoperator manipulator, the proposed control method enables the robot restoring back to the commanded pose when the obstacle avoidance task is accomplished. The performance of the proposed methods is demonstrated by simulation studies. The developed techniques are of great advantage to be used in teleoperation which requires safe interaction with environment.