Bilateral Teleoperation of a Formation of Mobile Robot Using Proportional Control and Obstacle Avoidance: Experimental Results

This article proposes a distributed formation control strategy for mobile robots (using TurtleBot3 Burger platforms) based on teleoperation using artificial forces and mechanical impedance modeling. The proposed control law is structured in cascade, consisting of an external loop responsible for maintaining the formation and an internal loop dedicated to obstacle avoidance. Bilateral teleoperation is enabled by integrating the Novint Falcon haptic device, which allows the human operator to issue velocity commands to the formation and receive force feedback based on the robots’ physical interactions with congested environments. This strategy improves remote perception of the environment and promotes safe and collaborative navigation, validated through experiments in real-world environments.