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

Abstract

This paper describes the development of the tele-robotic interface for a hot-line maintenance robot system. One of the main issues in designing human- robot interface 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. To design and test the interface, 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 processes are observed using the main-camera with 2 DOFs. Two joysticks, two data gloves, one pedal, and a Head Mounted Display (HMD) with tracker sensor were used as input devices. Designed human-interface system is operated using high-level control commands which are intuitive and easy to understand without any special training.