Delayed telop aid

A method for the teleoperation of robots, stored and executed by a computer platform, comprising the steps of:

• predicting robot motion from an operator's queued commands to an Operator Control Unit (OCU);
• creating synthetic images to produce a video feed that looks as if the robot communication link had no delay and no reduced bandwidth;
• controlling the robot's movement using closed loop;
• and
• displaying the synthetic image to an operator
• creating a 3D model of the environment;
• accurately controlling the vehicle to the predicted pose;
• providing an OpenGL based image reconstruction algorithm;
• providing a command interface to the robot for receiving distance and yaw input commands;
• dividing the required image processing between the vehicle and the OCU, taking into consideration the video quality and computational assets available;
• wherein the algorithm is chosen from one of the following for the group comprising:
• SIFT;
• a SURF feature for detection and tracking;
• Lucas-Kanade method;
• combined SURF feature tracking with Delaunay mesh generation;
• Kalman filtering techniques;
• and
• thin plate spline interpolation and curve fitting for synthetic image reconstruction;
• extracting SURF features for every frame;
• projecting SURF features from the image into the world frame using navigation data and our fish-eye camera model;
• performing ray intersection checks in 3D to determine if the ray originating at the camera location goes through the feature location in world frame;
• comparing each feature in the last frame is with every feature in the current frame;
• if the rays are close enough, a 3D location for that feature is computed;
• comparing the similarity of the SURF descriptors of the features in question, to each other, to increase the tracking accuracy;
• and
• if both conditions are satisfied, the track is considered good and added as a node to be used during an image reconstruction phase.