Design and Implementation for Controlling Multiple Robotic Systems by a Single Operator Under Random Communication Delays

Multiple robots can be tele-operated by a single operator to accomplish complicated tasks such as formation and co-transportation. Such systems are challenging because one operator needs to simultaneously tele-control multiple homogeneous and even heterogeneous robots. Besides, the communication between the operator and multi-robot system and the communication among the multiple robots are always subject to some communication constraints such as time delays. This chapter introduces a novel non-time based method to realize the single-operator-multi-robot (SOMR) teleoperation system with random communication delays. The problem is divided into a typical teleoperation problem and a multi-robot coordination problem. A non-time variable is taken as the system reference instead of the time to model and drive the system such that the random communication delays and some expected events could be automatically handled. Experiments implemented on a multi-robot system illustrate the effectiveness and advantages of the method.