Teleoperation of a Mobile Robot with Model-Predictive Obstacle Avoidance Control

This paper presents a mixed teleoperation/autonomous control approach for navigation and obstacle avoidance in mobile robots. The proposed method builds on an earlier general control framework that systematically combines teleoperation and autonomous control subtasks. This paper considers a scenario in which the user teleoperates a mobile robot while being assisted by an autonomous subtask designed to help avoid collisions with obstacles in the robot task environment. The autonomous subtask control commands are generated by formulating and solving a constrained optimization problem over a rolling horizon window of time into the future. The effectiveness of the proposed model-predictive control obstacle avoidance scheme is demonstrated in teleoperation experiments with a mobile robot using sonar measurements for obstacle localization.