Collision avoidance with haptic feedback for telepresence

Abstract

The use of telepresence becomes an alternative in scenarios such as deep sea maneuvers, inspection and maintenance in hazardous environments or aerial surveillance tasks, amongst some other robotic tasks. In some of these cases, human deployment might be dangerous, expensive and even not possible yet. Because of the wide variety and increasing tasks in which remote robots are being used, there is a desire of reducing the learning curve for navigation with robots and create transparent systems. To achieve this, intuitive information such as haptic data and force feedback is proposed. Because of the characteristics of the remote environments and to prevent damage to the robot and the environment itself, collision avoidance algorithms are implemented. These need to work with unknown and dynamic environments, such as an oil extraction platform. An added limitation for the remote deployment of robots is the communication channel. Information such as video, audio and control directives share the same communication channel and hence, the same bandwidth. It is important to have an intelligent data management system for the haptic information to prevent the saturation of such communication channels.