Visual guidance based shared remote operation control for hydraulic manipulators

Hydraulic manipulators are increasingly used in applications such as ocean exploration and forestry harvesting. Given the potential risks associated with the high output torque, remote operation offers an appropriate method for operating hydraulic manipulators. However, the master-slave heterogeneity in remote operations restricts the operational efficiency and precision, and the occlusions of the operator's field of view (FOV) can affect the accuracy of the master commands. While visual guidance can assist manipulator operation, the varying imaging conditions and potential target occlusions also limit the reliability of guidance commands. To address these challenges, this paper designs a visual guidance based shared remote operation control for hydraulic manipulators. On the one hand, the speed and accuracy of the mapped commands are balanced by the designed adaptive command mapping method. On the other hand, the reliability of the visual guidance command is enhanced through feature mismatch rectification and fault awareness. Subsequently, a dual-command fusion control method is developed to integrate the optimized commands, thereby achieving shared remote operation. Finally, various experiments are conducted to verify the proposed algorithms. The results demonstrate that the designed scheme guarantees the shared remote operation performance of hydraulic manipulators even when the operator's FOV is occluded.