Teleoperation of Real-time Robotics

DoCoMo aims to expand its businesses that support the everyday life infrastructure, based on it’s business providing communication infrastructure. In this context, consumer-oriented robots constitute one of the noteworthy areas, and the market is expected to grow dramatically in the everyday life-related fields in the future [1]. With the current technologies, autonomous robots with human-like intelligence and dexterity cannot be expected to appear in everyday or business situations until far into the future; remote controlled robots (telerobots), on the other hand, are a realistic step on the way, and this technology can be considered mature enough to be applied in the near future. In such applications, remote control technologies constitute a key factor in enabling people to operate robots and carry out various tasks efficiently in their everyday lives and in various business situations. Furthermore, in situations where a robot is placed at a remote location and is operated via networks, the ideal technology would provide transparent and bidirectional remote control that would allow the robot to behave as if the operator were present at the location. There are many technical issues involved when building telerobot systems, including issues related to actuators, sensors and other devices, but in this work we focused on the control and network issues in order to identify the requirements to establish the current and future communication infrastructure for remote robot control (teleoperation). Among these issues, establishing bidirectional and transparent real-time teleoperation technologies that can communicate senses of both force and touch to the operator, i.e., not limiting the teleoperation to simple radio control, is an important and challenging issue. Conventionally, feeding back an accurate sense of touch to the operator when a remote robot arm comes into contact with an object exposed various technical difficulties such as ensuring stability. This article provides an overview of the main technologies we examined so far.