Object-Centered Teleoperation of Mobile Manipulators With Remote Center of Motion Constraint

In the context of mobile manipulator teleoperation, intuitive control interfaces are fundamental not only to reduce the operator's workload, but also to improve the situational awareness during the task execution. In the case of object exploration tasks, different operator control units have been proposed, many of them inspired by the augmented reality, virtual reality, and computer games contexts. In this work, one such control interface, known as the
orbit control mode
, is formalized in terms of the remote center of motion constraints. This interface allows for the definition of a novel control mechanism able to take additional constraints, such as obstacle avoidance and manipulation dexterity, by the exploitation of the system redundancies. Experimental results obtained from a real teleoperation task confirm the validity of the approach.