Development of Tele-Robotic Interface for the Hot-Line Maintenance Robot System

Abstract

This paper describes the development of tele-robotic interface for the hot-line maintenance robot system. One of main issues in designing human-robot interface for the hot-line maintenance robot system is to plan the control procedure for each part of the robotic system. Another issue is that the actual degree of freedom (DOF) in the hot-line maintenance robot system is much greater than that of available control devices such as joysticks and gloves in the remote-cabin. For this purpose, a virtual simulator, which includes the virtual hot-line maintenance robot system and the environment, is developed in the 3D environment using CAD data. It is assumed that the control operation is done in the remote cabin and the overall work process is observed using the main-camera with 2 DOFs. For the input device, two joysticks, one pedal, two data gloves, and a Head Mounted Display (HMD) with tracker sensor were used. The interface is developed for each control mode. Designed human-interface system is operated using high-level control commands which are intuitive and easy to understand without any special training.