Until now, we have been developing a system for multiple mobile robot operation by a single human operator. In order that robots may achieve tasks in unknown environments, research focusing on the following three points must be conducted: 1) design of commands from the operator to the robots; 2) environmental recognition to show. the operator information about the remote work area where robots are working; and 3) interface between a system and the operator and information display of the work area for the operator. For 1), the focus is on the operation of the multiple robots by a single operator. Orders from the operator are divided into several levels and the relationship between the orders and the necessary autonomy of the robots are considered. For 2), the problem is divided into two parts; object recognition and self-positioning. Concerning the former, stereovision is used. Two robots, each equipped with a monocular camera, acquire a three-dimensional position of a point on the surface of an object within an environment. As for the latter, markers are placed on the robots so that their relative positions can be measured. As for 3), Graphical User Interface (GUI) is implemented. The operator mainly uses a mouse to input commands, and the operator watches a virtual environment to monitor remote working areas. The virtual environment is constructed with the environment information acquired by the method described in 2) above. After the problems mentioned above are solved, our system will provide a flexible command and monitoring structure and an operator would be able to command the robots appropriately. These are the main advantages of the method we are proposing. We verified the effectiveness of the proposed methods in experiments.
