Effect of force feedback on a bulldozer-type robot
Utilizing remote-controlled robots in damage restoration activities in disaster-affected areas such as those affected by a debris avalanche or an earthquake has significantly increased. Various types of remote-controlled robots have been successfully used along with construction machines in damage restoration activities in disaster-affected areas. Recently, a bulldozer-type robot removed the earth and sand deposited over a wide area because of a debris avalanche. To enable prompt damage restoration activities in disaster-affected areas, an efficient remote operation using robots is required. We study a remote-controlled bulldozer-type robot that moves objects using a system wherein the status of the stress applied on the bulldozer blade is provided as a force feedback to the operator. After conducting evaluation experiments, we could verify that the operating system providing force feedback to the operator shortened the operation time compared with the one that displayed visual information only on the operating screen.
Development of a Tele-earthwork System
The tele-earthwork system we have developed is able to remotely control unmanned power shovels and unmanned crawler dump trucks, and a series of unmanned operations ranging from excavation to transportation. The results of our demonstration tests proved that the tele-earthwork system is capable of performing remote-control operations at a point 1 kilometer or more away from construction sites, and its working efficiency through remote-control operation is approximately 0.4 lower than manned work.
Telerobotic control using augmented reality
A taxonomy for classifying human mediated control of remote manipulation systems is proposed, based on three dimensions: degree of machine autonomy, level of structure of the remote environment, and extent of knowledge, or modellability, of the remote world. For certain unstructured and thus difficult to model environments, a case is made for remote manipulation by means of director/agent control, rather than telepresence. The ARGOS augmented reality toolkit is presented, as a means for gathering quantitative spatial information about-i.e., for interactively creating a partial model of a remotely viewed 3D worksite. This information is used for off-line local programming of the remote manipulator-i.e. virtual telerobotic control-and when ready the final commands are transmitted for execution to the manipulator control system.