This paper reports a case study of using single 3D stereoscopic visual feedback for real-time teleoperation of dexterous tasks. In traditional teleoperation systems, real-time visual feedbacks of multiple monoscopic views of the robot workspace are provided for remote operator. However, it is difficult for the operator to control remote robot to perform dexterous tasks by looking at multiple video feedbacks at the same time. During teleoperation, remote operators usually find multiple 2D visual feedbacks confusing, especially when performing dexterous tasks that require accurate positioning and orientating of robot end-effectors. In this paper, we propose to provide single real-time 3D stereoscopic visual feedback for remote operators so that they perceive remote robot workspace with the sense of depth. This sense of 3D empowers remote operators to accurately position and orient robot end-effector with confidence. Experiments have been conducted to reveal the usefulness of real-time 3D stereoscopic video feedback over multiple monoscopic video feedback in real-time teleoperation.

With the rapid development of information technology, Internet has evolved from a simple data-sharing media to an amazing information world where people can enjoy different kinds of services. Recently, the use of the Internet has been expanded to the field of automation, i.e. using the Internet as a tool to control equipment located at remote sites. This paper presents a cooperative robot system consisting of a robot hand and a mobile robot carrying a stereo vision, which can be tele-operated by operators at different sites via the Internet. To overcome the instability and reliability problem caused by the random time delay of the Internet communication, we adopt an event as the reference for controller design of the system. A vision-based method is adopted to maintain interactions among the operations. Results obtained in teleoperation experiments among Hong Kong, the mainland China, and USA will be demonstrated to confirm the usefulness and effectiveness of the developed method and system.

In real-time Internet based teleoperation, different robotic tasks have different dexterity requirements during task progress and thus different network resources are required for safe and reliable task accomplishment. In order to control remote manipulators efficiently and smoothly via the Internet, dynamic bandwidth allocation is crucial to successful accomplishment of robotic tasks controlled by remote operator. In this paper, a novel bandwidth allocation mechanism is developed based on the online measured task dexterity index of current dexterous tasks so that operators can control remote manipulators efficiently and smoothly even under poor network quality. Experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented resource (bandwidth) allocation algorithm in Internet based teleoperation system.

This paper concentrates on transparency and synchronization of supermedia in Internet based teleoperation. Supermedia is used to describe the collection of all the feedback streams in teleoperations, such as haptic, video, audio, temperature and others. Transparency and synchronization are introduced and analyzed from the event-based control perspective. The concepts of event-transparency and event-synchronization for event-based control telerobotic systems are developed and their implications are studied. To illustrate those concepts and their benefits, the teleoperation of a mobile manipulator via the Internet, where haptic, video and temperature information is fed back to the operator, is discussed. Experimental results will verify the event-transparency and event-synchronization of this event-based telerobotic system.

This paper presents a QoS based efficiency improving scheme for Internet-based teleoperation. One of the widely used QoS parameters for showing network status is network delay. With the help of event-based control technique, the stability of the teleoperation systems is guaranteed under random network delay. This paper investigates how to improve the efficiency of teleoperated tasks based on the network quality by introducing a Command Negotiator and a robot controller gain adjustment scheme using the measured QoS parameters into the proposed QoS based teleoperation systems. The presented methods improve the efficiency and system responses of the teleoperation systems when the network quality is poor. Moreover, a teleoperation experiment is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller gains adjustment scheme.

Presents an integrated tactile feedback system for a multifingered robot hand to enable a human operator to feel contacts/interactions between the robot finger and the environment remotely. The system presented consists of a finger-shaped tactile sensor measuring contact areas on the fingertip and a tactile display rendering the contact information to the human operator. The tactile sensor, designed on the total internal reflection principle, can capture high resolution and high quality tactile images on the fingertip. The tactile display with 24 pins spaced at 2.5 mm uses DC solenoids structured in multi-layers to render the contacts between the fingertip and the environment. We have integrated the tactile sensor and the tactile display into a five-fingered robot hand system and verified the performance of the integrated system by experiments.