Telerobotic Control System to Enhance Rescue Operations for Arm-Equipped Tracked Vehicle HELIOS IX

This paper focuses on a telerobotic system in which an operator executes tasks by operating an arm-equipped tracked vehicle, HELIOS IX. It is necessary to develop an assisting sensor system, teleoperation system, and semi-autonomous robot motions to enhance teleoperationability, because HELIOS IX has many DOFs and unique mechanisms. To realize this development, the authors discuss the required specifications of the sensors, teleoperation system, and semi-autonomous motion planning. First, the sensor system for assistance and teleoperation system are described. Next, terrain-adaptive, tracked locomotion with no additional sensors is explained and verified through terrain traversing experiments. Then, the authors discuss the telerobotic system for the door opening task, a system based on Shared Autonomy, and demonstrate that HELIOS IX can successfully perform the door opening task. Finally, we describe what we have learned and the problems involved in the development of the telerobotic system of the HELIOS IX rescue robot.