Haptic Teleoperation
A tele-manipulation system provides telepresence by allowing a user to remotely control a slave robot through a master device. While these systems offer great potential, connecting master/slave stations in a coherent way is not trivial. While the master station is usually controlled by a human operator the slave station often interacts with an unknown and dynamic environment. The nature of the interaction greatly influences overall system performance.
Our group has been working on a new teleoperation scheme that utilizes local force control while exchanging only position information between the master and slave station. This scheme provides much better stability characteristics, while offering the user a realistic feeling of telepresence, through the use of a virtual spring. This proposed architecture is especially appropriate in the case where force sensing is limited only to the slave robot and the master device is relatively light and frictionless. Specifically, the use of a Phantom device and PUMA in our setup meets this criteria..