Semi-Autonomous Teleoperation of Multiple Wheeled Mobile Robots Over the Internet

We propose a semi-autonomous teleoperation control framework for wheeled mobile robots with nonholonomic constraints and second-order Lagrangian dynamics over the Internet. The proposed control architecture consists of the two control-loops: 1) local autonomous formation control, which, residing in the common workspace of the robots, ensures rigid formation-keeping among the robots regardless of human-command, varying-delay/packet-loss of the Internet, and external disturbance without any holding-fixture (e.g. fixture-less cooperative grasping); and 2) teleoperation-loop, which enables a (remote or coexisting) human operator to stably tele-drive the overall team maneuver (e.g. grasped object’s centroid motion) over the Internet with haptic-feedback. Simulation is performed to validate/highlight properties of the proposed control framework.