Experimental Study on Shared-Control of a Mobile Robot via a Haptic Device with an Optimal Velocity Obstacle Based Receding Horizon Control Approach

This paper addresses shared-control of a single mobile robot in an unknown environment via a Haptic device in order to have a collision-free motion and damp the system’s oscillations. Employing the receding horizon concept in order to meet the controlling criteria and using the approximated non-convex constraints to ensure the near-optimality of the proposed method lead to introducing an applicable algorithm. In this regard, the velocity obstacle concept is considered as avoiding constraint for the employed receding horizon method in the motion planning unite and the proposed optimization problem is solved by the mixed integer linear programming approach. Along with the aforementioned unite, the impedance methodology is employed in order to control the Haptic device as the master controller. For the sake of tuning the controller parameters and alleviating the plausible oscillations in the control states, the oscillation number index is utilized. The obtained experimental and simulation results reveal the fact that the proposed algorithm in the fully autonomous manner outperforms its prior counterparts such as conventional potential field with genetic algorithm. The implementation results of the extended algorithm in order to perform a shared-control of a Falcon Haptic device and an Epuck mobile robot are presented.