Predictive display of virtual beam for space teleoperation

Time delay reduces significantly the ability of teleoperation. This problem becomes especially serious in case of earth-to-space teleoperation, when the time delay is large. To overcome the problem, a predictive display technique has been proposed for non-contact tasks. However, the effectiveness of this technique has not been verified sufficiently. In this paper we propose a teleoperation system with time delay, based on the predictive display of a virtual beam, as well as on the concept of optimal approach velocity. The experimental results show that a peg-in-hole task, which includes a contact task, is realized very effectively by our method in spite of the long time delay. These results have been verified from various viewpoints such as task completion time, deviation of the task completion time, contact force, command, and integration of contact force and command.