Shared-Control Concepts for Large Vehicle-Manipulators

This paper presents two novel methods to generate haptic feedback for a human operating a large, hydraulic vehiclemanipulator. Such manipulators can be found in a wide range of applications (e.g. farming works, roadside maintenance, forestry applications). In general, they are controlled solely by a human operator, as the automation of such systems is too challenging due to their unstructured working environment. The work with such manipulators is often physically and psychologically demanding. In the presence of obstacles or other restrictions in the working area, haptic feedback can help to relieve the operator and increase his awareness. If the vehicle platform additionally moves during the operating process, state-of-the-art methods cannot be directly applied to generate haptic feedback. Therefore, we propose two shared-control concepts, based on potential field methods supporting the operator during his task. The first one is a modified trajectory guidance approach. The second one is a directly generated feedback approach, which does not compute a desired joystick position, but directly the haptic feedback. Both proposed methods do not need the reference trajectory of the manipulator, only the detected obstacles as a set of points. ... mehrThe reference trajectory is specified by the operator and is unknown to the automation. The two concepts are verified in a simple simulation environment. Finally, they are validated on a test bench, with a force-feedback joystick.