Shared control for teleoperation enhanced by autonomous obstacle avoidance of robot manipulator

In this paper, a human robot shared control strategy is developed and tested on a Baxter robot. Using the proposed method, the human operator only needs to consider the motion of the end-effector of the manipulator, while the manipulator will avoid obstacle by itself without sacrificing the end effector motion performance. An improved obstacle avoidance strategy based on the joint space redundancy of the manipulator is designed. A dimension reduction method is presented to solve the over defined problem of avoiding velocity to achieve a more efficient use of the redundancy. By employment of an artificial parallel system of the teleoperate manipulator and the task switching weighting factor, the proposed control method enable the robot restoring back to the commanded pose smoothly when the obstacle is removed. By implementing the dimension reduction method, the trajectory of each joint of the manipulator can be controlled at the same time to achieve the restoring task. Thus, the proposed control method can eliminate the impact of the obstacle on the remaining task. Satisfactory experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.