Visual Support System for Tele-operated Hand Robot

In situations such as disaster site and outer space, tele-operated robots can be effective tools. Authors develop a master-slave system consisting of a multi-fingered haptic interface and a humanoid hand robot. Tele-operation using a 2D image received from a remote site is difficult to understand in terms of the robot's relative position, posture and environment on remote site. In work involving grasping and manipulating objects, there is a risk of collision between the robot and the environment. This research construct an environmental model that enables binocular stereopsis by 3D information received from an RGB-D camera. This paper proposes a visual support system for a tele-operated humanoid hand robot that presents the operator with the closest point between the robot and environment.