Automatic-Switching-Based Asymmetric Motion Planning for Teleoperation of Wheeled Mobile Manipulator

The application of the autonomous wheeled mobile manipulator (WMM) in hazardous environments is still limited by the current intelligence of robots. A feasible solution to the challenge is to apply teleoperation technology to the WMM. In this paper, an automatic-switching-based asymmetric motion planning scheme for teleoperation of the WMM is implemented. Namely, a quintic B-spline online interpolator is designed in the master side to smooth the original signal, while the continuous switching factors are designed in the slave side, which can be used to automatically switch the position-position and position-velocity mapping modes, so that the operator can operate the mobile vehicle and the manipulator simultaneously using a single master device. The comparative experiments are conducted on the Simulink-CoppeliaSim semi-physical simulation platform to verify the feasibility of the proposed scheme.