Teleoperating a mobile manipulation using a UAV camera without robot self-occlusions

Abstract

[Abstract] The paper presents a novel teleoperation system that allows the simultaneous command of a mo- bile manipulator and a free ying camera, im- plemented using a UAV, from which the opera- tor can monitor the task execution in real-time. A novel use of the kinematic redundancy is pre- sented to prevent the robot parts from occluding the end-e ector to the operator view. Following an obstacle avoidance approach, an input is fed to the null space that keeps the robot links away from the end-e ector in the image plane as a sec- ondary task. Simulations and the implementation in a real setup show the goodness of the proposed approach.