Failure tolerant teleoperation of a kinematically redundant manipulator: An experimental study

M. Goel, A. A. Maciejewski, V. Balakrishnan and R. W. Proctor

IEEE Trans. Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 33(6):758-765, November 2003

Abstract: Teleoperated robots in harsh environments have a significant likelihood of failures. It has been shown in previous work that a common type of failure such as that of a joint locking up, when unidentified by the robot controller, can cause considerable performance degradation in the local behavior of the manipulator even for simple point-to-point motion tasks. The effects of a failure become more critical for a system with a human in the loop, where unpredictable behavior of the robotic arm can completely disorient the operator. In this experimental study involving teleoperation of a graphically simulated kinematically redundant manipulator, two control schemes, the pseudoinverse and a proposed failure-tolerant inverse, were randomly presented under both non-failure and failure scenarios to a group of operators. Based on performance measures derived from the recorded trajectory data and operator ratings of task difficulty, it is seen that the failure-tolerant inverse kinematic control scheme improved the performance of the human/robot system.

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