2001 Volume 19 Issue 4 Pages 492-498
During teleoperation, when the operator's attention is concentrated in controlling the end-effector motion, it is very difficult to recognize a possible link collision. Such collision may damage the environment or the link seriously, because usually the link has no sensors. In this paper, we propose a so-called“virtual radar”which displays the collision information considering the whole manipulator at the end-effector level. The computer checks for unreachable areas due to the presence of obstacles and displays the appropriate information mapped in task-space coordinates using a 3D graphical image. This enhances the reliability of the system. However, in the case of a 6 D.O.F manipulator, collision possibility space must be a 6 dimensional one and hence it is difficult to visualize and understand. To tackle this problem, a deformed sphere and patterns on its surface are employed. We have applied this method to a 6 D.O.F. manipulator and have verified the effectiveness of the proposed approach by experiments with a real telerobotic system.
