Abstract-Remote controlled robots on offshore oil and gas platforms can potentially reduce costs and improve environment, health and safety issues. A key to successful remote control is to provide onshore operators with a sufficient overview of the processes offshore. To this end, robot manipulators constitute flexible camera platforms, compared to e.g. simple pantilt units, for monitoring offshore operations. In this paper, we present a system solution and experimental results for real-time active camera control with obstacle avoidance for industrial manipulators based on weighted pseudoinverse redundancy resolution method. We extend the pseudoinverse solution for joint limit avoidance in combination with obstacle avoidance such that joint limits are graceful avoided. A novel choice of stereographic projection provides robustness with respect global stability and singularities. Implementation issues are addressed and the monitoring approach is experimentally validated on two Kuka KR-16 robot manipulators. Experimental results show that a follower robot with a camera is able to monitor and track a leader robot while simultaneously avoiding collisions. In addition, a robot control system architecture which ensures efficient and safe testing of new Matlab-implemented robot controllers is presented.

Abstract-In this paper, we present a solution and experimental results for real-time control of manipulation tasks considering the alignment of a robots end effector relative to some reference. The developed controller is applicable to industrial manipulators and is based on the pseudoinverse redundancy resolution method. The application considered is the employment of two industrial robots in an offshore remote inspection and maintenance system. A leader robot is controlled freely from onshore, and a follower robot uses an attached camera to provide the onshore operator with live video feed of the ongoing operation. Robot manipulators constitute flexible camera platforms, compared to e.g. simple pan/tilt units, for monitoring offshore operations. We develop a controller for the follower robot such that automatic camera tracking is achieved using pseudoinverse redundancy resolution control. A minimal task space parametrization relying on stereographic projection is constructed which achieves relative end effector alignment tracking without introducing representational or algorithmic singularities. It is shown that singular configurations will only in special cases affect the closed loop behavior. The controller is applicable to tasks such as spray painting or polishing on curved surfaces. The control approach is experimentally validated on two Kuka KR-16 industrial robot manipulators.