The Small Outdoor Rover MERLIN and Its Assistance System for Tele-operations

Abstract

Tele-operated rovers offer huge application potential in the areas of emergency support, surveillance and security, in particular if they are small and easy to transport. In this context, the MERLIN outdoor rovers have been designed for robust operations in harsh outdoor environments at a total mass below 20 kg. The MERLIN rover system design aspects are described, including the rover on-board data processing and the sensor configuration. Special emphasis is on the remote operations assistance system, composed of the human-machine interface for appropriate presentation of relevant data at the tele-operator workplace and the autonomous reaction capabilities coordinated by the on-board data handling system.

Commanding mobile robots via wireless ad-hoc networks — A comparison of four ad-hoc routing protocol implementations

“…Up to 4 MERLIN robots (standard version) were used as stationary communication relay nodes, and one Outdoor MERLIN was used (cf. Figure 3) [21]. All MERLIN robots have a C167 microcontroller for low-level operations and sensor data processing, as well as a PC-104 for more complex and computationally more intensive tasks.…”

“…For further details on the MERLIN Control Protocol refer to [21] and [22]. As transport protocol, UDP is used which will additionally add 8 bytes for the UDP header.…”

A Behaviour-based Integration of Fully Autonomous, Semi-autonomous, and Tele-operated Control Modes for an Off-road Robot

“…In Eck et al (2007), two different types of support for a tele-operator are identified, called passive and active support, respectively. Passive support is a combining term for all methods with which a system consults or advises the operator, e. g. by displaying status messages at the operator's console.…”

Video Transmission With Adaptive Quality Based on Network Feedback for Mobile Robot Teleoperation in Wireless Multi-Hop Networks

“…One is the PC of the operator, one is an Outdoor MERLIN (cf. Figure 3) (Eck et al, 2007), and two intermediate nodes are MERLIN robots (indoor version). More details on the scenario are shown in Figure 2 and a detailed description of the test setup is given in Section 2.…”