Abstract
Image transmission delay is a serious problem for a remote operator when he/she controls a robot according to the images transmitted by the robot through the narrow band width channel or from the extremely distant place. We propose a simple method to improve the remote control operability by introducing the estimated image sequence that is generated from the delayed images. The robot is equipped with the omni-directional camera to make the processing easy. The image shown to the operator is estimated from the transmitted image according to the robot motion and the delay time. The received image is magnified in case of the forward movement, while it is shifted in case of the rotational movement of the robot. As the operator can see the estimated present image without time delay, he/she does not miss the timing of the control. This paper describes the proposed image estimation method and the constructed robot system with some experimental results to demonstrate the validity of our method.
